In my Dutch game I conquered Germany from the off, needed a production base to pump out gold while I colonised the world. Even though I stuck to traditional areas like South Africa, Australia and South America my Expansion stability stayed around -200<-300, all I can say is constantly golden age until you have spare cities to liberate. The fact you cannot collapse saved my bacon, although cities can still declare independence during a golden age it only happened to my new empty one-island cities. Again, thank God for dikes!