If you go full innovative, your colonies will take much longer to develop, and you'll also have lots of wrong-religion provinces because you won't get any missionaries, meaning -30% income and more revolts. The penalties from all of those things can actually outweigh the benefits of going innovative, especially if you have to mint to pay for all your colonies and the larger army you'll need to crush religious rebels.About innovative/narrowminded - Is the increase in colonial growth really worth the decrease in tech research when going narrowminded? I have always choosen sliders according to be able to tech fast.
Remember the bonus for going to maximum -5 Innovative is +15% tech speed; but if you use National Bank to mint 10% of your income, that's effectively a -10% penalty to tech speed. If you avoid minting, you can stay narrowminded and still advance quickly in tech.
A good strategy is actually to go narrow-minded in the mid-game, when you're colonising and the Reformation is in progress. Once that's mostly over, use your next slider moves to head back to Innovative.
Depends. If you're advanced enough to be running into ahead-of-time penalties it's best to spread research out evenly. If you're a country that is normally lagging behind in tech then yes, you should prioritise the most important ones.Would it be best to balance spending evenly on them, or should you always prioritize. I tend to favour land and naval.. often falling a bit behind behind in the economy ones.
Bear in mind that the cultural tradition from Gilded Icons lets you hire 5-star advisors. If you're making 10 ducats per month from tax and 100 per month from trade, then a 5-star Collector will bring in 5 ducats extra per month, more than offsetting the 0.8 ducat cost of Gilded Iconography.Many people rave about it, some think it's not worth the tax hit.