Thats weird man, cos when i got bts i had to bump up the difficulty a notch to monarch, and still i kick their asses man.
Did they do something to the techs or something cos i'm always like a thousand years ahead of everyone, and ahead of where i should be, so it's not the AI.
It's largely dependant on the map and the other AI's. (Note, I play large/marathon)
When I first started playing BTS I too was also miles ahead in tech (noble and first few prince games.)
Since then I've had a couple games where the AI is running rampent in tech. For instance, in one game playing as Sitting Bull, I found myself on my own large but rather dry and happy-resource poor continent. I slowly stuggled to fill in the land, barely managing to keep my tech rate at 60% even though I had spammed as many cottages as I could. There were times when I had literally nothing to built (so I build settlers and pre-positioned them on future city spots as my economy allowed.)
But Cyrus (who it turns out was reachable byisland hopping) founded a religion and spread it, peacefully vassalized Williem, then proceeded to scream through the tech tree. He was finishing wonders before I even got the prereq tech. I was starting to catch up when Cyrus decided my remaining lands would be a good place to expand. As I was almost entirely dependant on Cyrus for happy resources, I couldn't declare war to kick him out ...
(so I decided to retire. Another game saw Perciles run amok. He was building wonders and popping GP's at a clip I've never seen. I didn't have contact with him at the time, but watching the replay revealed who that monster Civ was ....)
The point being, if the AI does not get bogged down in an early war, they are quite capable of teching/wonder/GP building at a furious rate. (As I non-warmonger, I've found organized, financial, and industrous leaders do best for me so far in my BTS games.)
