I enjoy the game and play on the Metropolis level to do some empire building. I've noticed in the last few games, most AI competitors are more or less keeping pace with me and providing a challenge. But when I get to about the Industrial and Modern era's its like the AI goes super powered and goes from tangling with me in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place and just WAY WAY WAY outpaces me. Outpacing me to the point where I'm just discovering electricity and he is a few techs behind me and a few turns later they are flying planes and expanding at a breakneck pace.

Is this some kind of "blue shell" coding built into the AI? Am I missing some kind of slingshot mechanic that I should be taking advantage of? They just start eating up other AI empires and while its fun to have a nice challenge, it is less fun to be squaring off for a showdown and out from behind a curtain comes a super powerful beast.  I look at the end game charts and the growth does seem to be exponential while everyone elses growth, including mine, is more or less linear.  On the one thing I did go "all in" on, influence, I kept pace with him more or less, but on everything else once he hit Era V, it wasn't even close. This is in ALL metrics, influence, money, science, and so on. There is no way I could raise ALL of my stats that high, unless I"m massively missing something.

Should I be just going all in on one thing like science?  Should I share the save here somehow and have someone examine what went down?  My cities are always building something, always producing something, always moving as fast as stability will allow. 

Or is this just how it is and I need to git gud?