I may have time to play out the start tonight, but just a general comment...
Will_518 said:
I found Emperor to be a real chanllege. If I go for Stonehenge and Pyrimids, and buildings I get eaten alive by Barbs pillaging like hell.
First off, going for both Stonehenge and the Pyramids is almost certainly a bad idea if you're not industrious with the right resources. Even if you are, the Pyramids alone is a major investment.
As to the barbs, while there are many things I still really struggle with on Emperor, I think I'm pretty OK at this part. You don't need a ton of military early on - you need just enough in exactly the right locations. Barbs only spawn in the fog, so if a neighbor is already at your border, you shouldn't have barb issues there. Second, get some warriors (archers are unnecessary for at least 50-75 turns) out on some forest/jungle hills, where they can disperse the fog and get good defense. When they promote, take Woodsman. That's really almost all the barb defense you need, so long as you keep them from setting up a camp. Also, when you've almost got a settler produced, get
two warriors out to the target site (or an adjacent forest) well before the settler gets there. One is not enough - I have effectively lost games by using only a single warrior to guard a site, then having a barb archer kill it, promote, and proceed to kill every other warrior I could send after it, promoting further. Take two - if one gets killed, the other finishes the job.
Cities are really not such a big deal to defend so long as there's open land left for the AI's. As long as I have fog-busters in the vicinity, I'm fine with a single warrior in the city. Maybe two in cities that are surrounded by frontier, but generally one is OK. As the map starts to fill, I go for an archer and a spear in border cities, and once all the land is almost gone then real military buildup begins. But you definitely can't overbuild early on - as you're seeing, the unit costs will kill your tech and you need to be spending hammers on obelisks/barracks/granaries and, more importantly, settlers and workers.
edit: Also, if you haven't already read it, you might want to check
the thread I started a week or so back, very similar to this one. I got a lot of great ideas from that.