Does the AI "cheat"?

[Nick_K]

Gandalf - are you /sure/ that the only advantage the AI gets is starting points? I seem to face lots of enemies with very large armies even when their scales are not so impressive.

In fact, considering how poorly the AI uses its pretender design points I'd expect the different difficulties would not be very different in terms of how hard they are if this is the case. I was under the impression that the AI got a bonus to gold income at least on higher difficulties.