How can I avoid the Civilization 5 glitch where all the players go to Prince setting?

My friends and I keep trying to do multiplayer games of Civilization 5, but we have a lot of trouble- the difficulty always resets to Prince. Apparently, this is a huge problem for a lot of people and Firaxis hasn't fixed the problem in >3 years now. Are there any ways to avoid the issue? I have ruled out the starting difficulty as the cause of the glitch, and I have ruled out that it is not specific to whether you are playing online or on LAN.

It has become obvious that we can't fix the glitch, I just would like to know how to avoid it.

Solution 1:

There is no way to avoid it. Unfortunately, Civilization 5's multiplayer is extremely buggy and there is often no workaround for the problems that you may face.

As difficulty compensation, if you find the AI too easy, add more of them, if you find them too hard, make less of them, and if barbarians are too easy, enable raging barbarians. You can also change whether or not you have a start bias, and the sparsity of materials in the world.