In my current game of civ I switched once I got the Republic to 100% cash. I was getting around 300 a turn then. It's now modern ages and I have a democratic gov. and am getting around 900 gold p/t.
My closest ally and one of the largest civs in the game ( I was 4th out of 5 ) was trading techs with me for my world map and 1000 odd gold. This was just 3 turns worth of gold compared to my previous research rate of 20+ turns per tech. Also you never run out of cash and always keep up in research. Obviously your allies aren't always going to have techs to trade so any other turns you can just stockpile your money
This is a very good strategy but you need to know a large civ fairly well to get cheap tech off of and also you need to make sure you can change back to teching if you need to but I always build lib and Unis for the culture value anyway so...
Just wondering how many other people have tried this,
