I recently won my first Emperor game. I was Frederick (philosphical/organized). I ran a specialist/mixed economy for the majority of the game. As most of you know the key to a succesful specialist economy is the pyrmaids. Alothough getting the pyrmaids before the AI is often a huge challenge I believe I've found away to get it without stone and minimal chopping. The Key is to build the GreatWall. How would building the great wall be the key to getting the pyramids you might ask. Well the Great wall is 200 hammers cheaper than the Pyramids which is quiete signficant and the great wall also produces 2Gp/turn an engineer 4gp/turn if your phil. (this is the most important part) So, in 50/25 turns (normal speed) you will have a Greay Engineer. Use this great engineer to rush the pyrmaids. You will now have accesss to the powerful representation trait and will be producing 4gp/turn of engineet (8gp/turn for phil). In another 50/25 turns you will have your second Great Engineer. Use this one to rush the Great Library. I built the GL in a different city than my capital and made this city (w/ high food growing capabilities) into a super science city, as well as Great Scientist factory. By building in a different city this allows better control of what great people you produce. My pyrmaids/greatwalll city produced Great Engineers, while my Great library/science city produced great scientists. This allowed me to get a catch up to the AI and actually get a decent tech lead (for Emperor anyways). This works pretty good as on the way to literature you need alphabet and you can trade for techs you missed out. This is a saferway to get a specialist economy running early on and is less of a gambit than just straight for pyramids although this makes Philisphical nessicary as you will have twice as many turns to produce your Great Engineers. This strategy also allows you to spend more productions on military early on as you only need to spend 250 on the Great wall and the rest can go to military/expansion. This strategy can be played as most philisophical leaders (alex, peter, frederick and gandhi) but isnt very practical for other leaders. Tell me what you think any suggestions.