1) Start as France. I know, I'm starting to sound like a broken record
2) Play normally, buying policies from Liberty to start (+1 culture per city is crucial). "Playing normally" as the French I usually find involves getting to 4-6 cities in very short order using Liberty's bonuses to keep you together.
3) Choose a point of the game to go on a MASS growing spree. Conquer, build lots of cities, everything. Stop buying all policies. Keep this state for a good 1-2 eras at least. Only invest heavily in your starting 4 cities. Again, don't buy a single policy.
4) Choose your "breathing out" point. Sell all but around 4 of your cities for massive amounts of gold and resources. Buy the Freedom branch -25% social policy costs first. Now buy all your policies at greatly reduced cost. If you want to go really crazy, wait until you have a massive amount, sell everything but your capitol, then buy all the policies to build the Utopia Project.
Here's an example of what you're paying. You just had an empire with 15 cities as France (not hard - just build tight), raking in +3 culture per city + other culture buildings. You saved everything. If you were to buy a policy, it would cost you 1+(.3*14)=5.2 times a single city empire. Factoring in purposely waiting for the -25% policy cost, you're paying only 14%. That's an 86% discount.
There are 2 things put into place to try and prevent ICS: unhappiness, and social policy costs.
Unfortunately, unhappiness has two problems: it's not at an increasing rate so it really doesn't matter if you spread rapidly, and secondly my previous thread showed being really unhappy really doesn't matter too much.
As for social policy costs, my above example shows that they don't matter so much as well. Small empires simply don't have the advantage over really massive ones because of how easy it is to game the costs.
2) Play normally, buying policies from Liberty to start (+1 culture per city is crucial). "Playing normally" as the French I usually find involves getting to 4-6 cities in very short order using Liberty's bonuses to keep you together.
3) Choose a point of the game to go on a MASS growing spree. Conquer, build lots of cities, everything. Stop buying all policies. Keep this state for a good 1-2 eras at least. Only invest heavily in your starting 4 cities. Again, don't buy a single policy.
4) Choose your "breathing out" point. Sell all but around 4 of your cities for massive amounts of gold and resources. Buy the Freedom branch -25% social policy costs first. Now buy all your policies at greatly reduced cost. If you want to go really crazy, wait until you have a massive amount, sell everything but your capitol, then buy all the policies to build the Utopia Project.
Here's an example of what you're paying. You just had an empire with 15 cities as France (not hard - just build tight), raking in +3 culture per city + other culture buildings. You saved everything. If you were to buy a policy, it would cost you 1+(.3*14)=5.2 times a single city empire. Factoring in purposely waiting for the -25% policy cost, you're paying only 14%. That's an 86% discount.
There are 2 things put into place to try and prevent ICS: unhappiness, and social policy costs.
Unfortunately, unhappiness has two problems: it's not at an increasing rate so it really doesn't matter if you spread rapidly, and secondly my previous thread showed being really unhappy really doesn't matter too much.
As for social policy costs, my above example shows that they don't matter so much as well. Small empires simply don't have the advantage over really massive ones because of how easy it is to game the costs.