There's a pretty big difference between changing difficulty settings and adding autocast.
There is, but it takes some nuance for changing difficulty settings to be an effective stand in for autocast and the only game that really does this kind of thing at all is AI War and that's its whole shtick.
At this juncture though autocast is off the table, differing armies is off the table and the easy difficulty isn't really satisfying. The only real option for now is to drop the game speed down. That's far from ideal so hopefully there will be some access to mod tools. If I can put together something that increases the research cost of abilities like Death from Above, Charm, Mustard Gas and so on (that affects the AI as well) it will make the single player a lot more manageable for those of us with mediocre mouse skills.
