Can someone tell me how the specialist economy works? I've tried building tons of farms near cities with great food resources, shoot for Caste System, and have a crapload of merchant specialists in my cities. I truly am the richest civ in these games. However, I find the necessity to have cottage based cities as well to fund my science. A hybrid economy works rather nicely (b/c I can always have 100% research), but I'd really like to try a pure specialist economy. Can someone help?

...you hire scientist specialists? Duh.

Duh? How is scientist specialists good for gold? If I'm building extremely few cottages, where's the gold coming from?

EDIT: Is the specialist economy a hybrid of all specialists? I don't see how research can keep up if I have to have many merchant specialists to cover all my expenses. On the other side I don't see how I can have a decent gold income if I have too many scientists to keep up on research.

2nd EDIT: Also, if I have founded a religion, spread it sufficiently, and built its shrine, should I keep the science slider as high as it can go or should I devote it all (or most) to gold (considering I will have very few cottages)?

The idea is to rely on the beakers generated by your scientist specialists and lightbulbing techs with great people. If you do it well, you can set your science rate to 0% so that whatever gold you get from working resources or the few cottages is used to pay for your expenses and the leftovers accumulated for whatever use you might have (eg. buying techs off other civs).

Why do you want gold?
The specialist economy is to use scientists for your research. This means that the research / gold slider becomes obsolete and you can have it at 100% gold if you wish. Its good to have a couple of cities with cottages though to give you enough gold.
You then want to swap from specialist to cottages, when ? comes around as workers get +50% bonus, sorry I can't remember the tech.

The result being is superb early research (where it really counts), lots of great people early (when they are best), slower research during transition to cottages though - shouldn't matter so much at this stage cos you will be light years ahead or able to trade to keep up. The civic for quicker growth of cottages is also useful.

^^^Many thanks to shivute and aelf for your advise. I didn't realize I was supposed to switch to cottage economy later in the game. This makes perfect sense as it is usually in the later stages that my army is large enough to demand a large lot of gold. I'm starting a new game tonight, and will definitely employ these techniques. Thanks again!

EDIT: Why do you want gold? I was refering to my overall income to fund armies, civics, new/conquered cities, and colonies in the "new world".

Well, if you can win by the industrial age, there might not be a need to switch to a cottage economy. You are supposed to do the switch after you run Emancipation, and there's no real point in doing it if you can get domination soon after adopting that civic.

Yeah emancipation, thats the one. cheers Aelf

I don't think the OP fully understands the difference between commerce :commerce: and :gold:. Cottages do not produce gold, so you don't need to assign merchants to compensate for your lack of cottages. Cottage produce commerce, which is then converted into gold and science by way of the slider. If you set it on 70% then most of the commerce is spent on science, and the remaining 30% goes to producing gold for you to spend. The slider means very little in SE games, because most of your reseach and gold comes from elsewhere, and isn't affected by the slider.

Specialists basically bypass commerce, because they produce gold and science in their pure forms without anything being converted by the slider. You just assign the specialists you need. If you want science, then scientists, if you want gold to spend on stuff, then you want merchants.