advanced starts are awesome!!
does the AI have thesame money?

Care to elaborate a little on why you like advanced starts that much? I didn't have the chance to try them out yet but I'm very interested.

The AI has the same money but the player gets to cheat and lay down their empire first, and the AI seems to focus more on resources and units. Which makes no sense because there is a 10 turn no-war peroid. They wont spend on techs which means you can snag meditation with any leader to found a religion before the game starts.

Gets to cheat? by lay down there empire first? I hardly call that cheating, the AI gets more points the higher the difficulty level

The AI do go after tech including religion especially if its leaders like Isabella.

Going for a religion tech with advanced start if you don't start with mysticism hurts you more in the long term as the points are not invested in cities, workers, and growth techs. You can always get a religion later from monotheism or Col.

The real problem is as you said the AI focus its points on units and improvements and not on cities and workers.

I don't like advanced starts much. I can't really point out flaws with it, it just seems that I'm not very good at it. The AI will always start out better off than me, and I will often not quite catch up, atleast not for a while.

I don't have the game yet, but I'm trying to understand the point of this feature. the original game has always had the option to start a game in a later era, so you can be building and using modern units right away. the advanced starts feature just seems to let you place a few cities down but you are still basically near the beginning of the tech tree, right? early city placement and decision making is one of the best parts of the game, so why skip that part? how does it fast forward to using modern units any better than the custom game options that are already there.

You're supposed to set the game to a later era also, not just hit the advanced start button on a custom game.

I don't have it yet either, but it seems to me t be the best new feature in the game. The worst part of the game is the extremely slow production time at the beginning, especially if you start a few ages in to the game (as I often do). It can take a hundred turns to build your first defender. I am most looking forward to starting with a city or two with decent production so that I can actually do something instead of just clicking next turn over and over again.