I believe the idea, at some point, is to have a setting. One for the player is always the first to reach the next stage, one for fierce competition that ends with the player being declared to have lose if the AI beats them to the next stage, and (hopefully) one in between in which the AI reaching the next stage first makes the game much harder, but the player still has a chance to survive, though it would be difficult for them to catch up unless some disaster took out the AI ahead of them.
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