I noticed while playing that you occasionally get awarded free instant research or policies, so I did a bit of Cheat Engine fiddling and found the values. With this you can get to the future era as soon as you have founded a city.
Quick description for others who use CE: Find the policy points (as a 4 byte word) that are displayed on the title bar, and once you have the address, Free Techs (byte) are +684 and Free Policies are +690 added to the policy address.
Be warned, this does take away all the challenge in the game.
Not sure how much easier I can explain it. If you don't know the basics of CE, it does come with a tutorial (though I skip the part about pointers because it's confusing)
Well I can find the address but do you mean change the value the address has or actually change the address because if its just the value heck you could just change that to something like 100000 and buy buy new policies but I have no idea how to change adress.
There's an Add address manually button there, just calculate the offsets and add manually at the new value and then give yourself 30 free techs or whatever.
1) Find the address for the policy points by doing a search for "4 bytes" and "exact value".
2) Keep changing the value and doing the "Next search" as the policy points change (you can actually use the CH trainer for this), until you have only 1 address left.
3) Take that address (it's an 8-digit hexadecimal number) and add either 684 (for techs) or 690 (for policy points) using a hexadecimal calculator that you either have or find online (one I used is here: Link)
4) Now click "Add Address Manually" and type in the resulting number. Now just change that value to whatever however many techs you want...I think there's a total of 73...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Intel Core i7 3930K EVGA GTX 690 4x4GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 ASUS Xonar Phoebus Soundcard Windows 8 Pro 64-bit Corsair Obsidian 800D w/ Custom Water Cooling