I'm concerned over the numbers of kingdoms arround this age, currently the count is 193 and that could go up with the new changes while the number of players have a tendency to drop slightly as the age progresses and is just below 4k.
This means we are close to see an average of below 20 provinces a kingdom, and while some can still count 25 members that leaves even fewer for the rest of the kingdoms out there and surely more teams will have a hard time geting filled to 22 provinces on a permanent basis.
While I cherish the fact that people now got the freedom to create their own kingdoms and decide to keep that last spot from being filled constantly with an inactive player, and genneraly think it is one of the main reasons for more players returning than leaving this age, I can not help but think this will make it hard for some kingdoms to play and compete this age because they need 22 players to be even with another 22 player kingdom, and gooing with less will make it hard to find kingdoms that are both the same size and with the same numbers of players to compete against.
I believe that if the trend continues we could see a lot of established kingdoms struggle later in the age and maybe give up altogether, some kingdoms that may have been arround for ages and which many of us outside the top have encountered one way or the other.