why can I only seem to choose monarch difficulty on hotseat multiplayer

As far as I know, monarch is the only multiplayer difficulty allowed. It probably makes sense, I assume the idea is that two complete beginners would probably help each other out to make for an easy game, whilst two hardcore players will probably try and screw each other over all the time to balance it out ;)

Yeah that makes sense. Is there anyway I can change it though? How hard would it have to been to let people choose.

I'd like to know if there is a way to change the difficulty, I wanna play it with my friend but we both suck :P