Underhanded practices?

[Sidaric]

Just joined via mobile iOS and immediately have run into some rather odd practice, in most games of this sort I believe it would be called exploitation and bannable - at best its Gamesmanship.

Where I was placed the parish had 20 flags but no gold, my understanding is that no-one had become parish steward therefore no one could attack to get the flags, I was the only apparently active player in this parish.

I planned ahead and decided to invest in merchants to feed the parish gold via market sales and wait till I had accrued enough parish gold to use all 20 flags immediately upon becoming Parish Steward. This would have taken place tomorrow, now to the rather unsavoury incident.

A player of House 13, the ruling house in this area controlling all of Canada must have seen my activity and decided those flags were better used elsewhere. He moved into the parish by buying one of the empty city slots and immediately used monks to make himself parish steward, he did nothing to improve the parish instead he allowed another of his alliance members to attack from a neighbouring parish to gain all 20 parish flags with no chance for me to stop him or intervene.
Now maybe this game allows such behaviour but I can tell you now I do not play games that allow this kind of move.

I am interested to hear if this is accepted or indeed 'normal' behaviour before I decide to leave this game behind. Bit pointless when this parish has been destroyed with no hope of being rebuilt as will never have flags to build the parish castle defences now.

[Sidaric]

Well they have finished with my parish and dropped the village they took, I see the same player is now moving into another parish that has 17 flags to repeat the same.