Double the Price, Same Result

I've been playing around with ways to get the factions to develop at a more historical pace. Since there aren't internal politics, coordinated offenses, etc I decided to double the price of all buildings in early. I play tested it as the Turks and I still took Cairo and Constantinople by 1100 (exactly 1100 actually). I know I should have used the map cheat and stood back and watched but has anyone else tried to slow down the game?

I noticed something interesting too: Maybe because of the building costs the Byzantines were fielding a LOT of missile units.

The AI is a poor manager of funds. They're broke all the time anyway in my experience. Doubling the price would only slow me down. I will say this. Playing with huge units slows things down a little overall and definately changes a lot of opening strategies!

I left farming prices the same since I'm using the XL mod hoping to encourage the AI to build more of them. I guess It didn't work so well. I'm not about to begin messing with build priorities in the spreadsheets. Too much for me.