The best thing about being not catholic is that you can form Prussia
Well, if you are the Teutonic Order, you can form Prussia without being protestant/reformed. Considering that you are located in a comparatively bad economic zone and is in need of an additional boost, reformed is usually the way to go, though.
That's not entirely true. Colonial powers definitely want to be Narrowminded for the colonial growth. Mixing Narrowminded with Free Subjects still provides a net tech cost reduction (-20% from FS, +15% from NW is a net -5%) while giving a free CB on any state until 1650 (Holy War for infidels, Cleansing of Heresy for heretics, Excommunication for Catholics) and up to 1.5 annual Infamy reduction. I'd take that 11/10 times as a blobbing continental power over the tech gain from being Innovative.Problem is that its not really optimizing to stay catholic in 9 cases out of 10. Optimizing means going full innovative and probably fully free subjects. That means your papal influence is horrible, which means that even as a catholic power you wont really control the curia. Both reformed Religions give you lots of monetary benefits, so I really dont see a point in staying catholic unless you are the pope.
Revolts which can still effortlessly be crushed. I'm honestly surprised if you're telling me you don't put down Fort 1s in all your provinces ASAP. That seems like a pretty universally good course of action. With a single Fort 1 down you've got a few months at the absolute minimum and (assuming of course that you didn't go full Offensive) likely several more. Unless you just decided to convert on a whim without making any preparations and basically just waited for big revolts to show up before trying to begin to prepare for them, they really are easily manageable.
Problem is that its not really optimizing to stay catholic in 9 cases out of 10. Optimizing means going full innovative and probably fully free subjects. That means your papal influence is horrible, which means that even as a catholic power you wont really control the curia. Both reformed Religions give you lots of monetary benefits, so I really dont see a point in staying catholic unless you are the pope.
That's not entirely true. Colonial powers definitely want to be Narrowminded for the colonial growth. Mixing Narrowminded with Free Subjects still provides a net tech cost reduction (-20% from FS, +15% from NW is a net -5%) while giving a free CB on any state until 1650 (Holy War for infidels, Cleansing of Heresy for heretics, Excommunication for Catholics) and up to 1.5 annual Infamy reduction. I'd take that 11/10 times as a blobbing continental power over the tech gain from being Innovative.
(1) No, it's not a fallacious comparison by any means. I'm not comparing the two possibilities to each other. The point of using a neutral state is to have a control group for better analysis of the variables at play. And I'm not sure where your 35% figure comes from; it's a net change between them of 30%, not 35%. Further, the effect of too-early techs isn't being considered here; in practice a full Narrowminded country won't be teching 30% slower than a full Innovative country, because the Innovative country will get hit with rather harsh tech costs that will prevent it from simply growing at the same rate. I don't have the data on me to calculate out the effects of that, but I think it's fair to suffice to say that you won't actually be looking at a 30% differential (and thank goodness, too - how broken would that be?).First: The "net tech gain" from narrowminded/FS is a fallacious comparison. You're comparing Narrowminded/FS to a neutral state, and not comparing Narrowminded/FS to Innovative/FS, which has a net tech cost of -35%. Significantly better than -5%.
Second: Colonial powers can go either way. While I concede that narrowmindedness allows for accelerated colonization, you're also going to need to deal with "the minorities flock to the province" (which leaves your colonies wrong-religion for decades). For a pure colonizer-trader who isn't interested in European wars, I'd go for Innovative.