Hmmm. I'm skeptical that this is the case. In my (limited and anecdotal) experience, the AI DOES get the points, and it DOES use them. I might be wrong. It would be good to know this for certain. If it is working the way you suggest, then the Advance Start option is really just a way to give the human an advantage at the beginning, and something tells me that this is not what it is intended to be; but I might be wrong. I cannot imagine why they would have 7 or 10 difficulty levels AND an advance start option mechanism for giving even finer shades of differentiation between the difficulty levels; but I might be wrong Then again, it may be that this was something they added fairly late in development, and did not have enough time to test and see if the AI 'understood' it sufficiently to use it properly.

The one thing that might be throwing you off is that the AI does not seem to view the Advance Start Points the same way we humans do. For me, if I use advance start to get a nice balanced situation: 3 to 4 cities; a few military units, a few workers, a couple naval; some culture expansion, maybe one key Tech (depending on how many points I have to spend). I think the AI tends to blow his points on: (a) population; (b) tile improvements; (c) culture and/or (c) cheapo units.

Examples, I started up a random standard map on Noble diff industrial era start, just to see how it worked. I set it at about 45,000 start points. I immediately set a city and a worker, some tile improvements, another city, then I spent about 20,000 some odd points on a Tech or two, and this allowed me to place some INFANTRY. I wound up with about 5 cities in the 3 to 4 pop size range, a modest amount of tile improvements, two key techs ahead (Communism, and the one for infantry, forget what it is), about 3 infantry, 3 riflemen, a couple pirates, a couple caravels, a couple frigates, and one worker.

The AI whom I first contacted meanwhile had seemingly zero additional techs beyond those that come with Industrial start, but had all cities above 6 or 7 size, and had many more tile improvements. His best units were riflemen.

Instead, generate a new random map with same settings, and a start date that is Classical I suppose.

Make sure Celts are on an isolated continent by themselves. Make sure all the key resources that each tribe has access to are there, in their territories.

Give every civ the Techs, units, cities and buildings that it has. That's it.

It would still be quite laborious and tedious, and I don't have the time to do it myself, but it would not actually need to be as laborious and tedious as exactly replicating the map.

I agree with my learned friends, and if we did go down the road of a two team game this discussion is moot as well.

I'm in favor of starting over, as it would personally spark new interest for me.  I also imagine the same interest would be generated for others (both new and old).

Start from scratch, imo.