Except with how trade companies work now, autonomy reduction is worthless. When they had a floor of 0 you could make a case for this reform, but depending on how large you get this reform ranges situational to utterly worthless.
Best gov reforms?
- Thread starter Lucododosor
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I wanted to add one quick point here:
There is a massive difference between four and five slots in 1610 due to the age objective to accept five cultures. In particular it will knock a fair bit of time off getting your 5% admin efficiency.
If taking tech on time without other bonuses you only get that fifth slot in 1651.
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If your borders are solid, then you should be able to manage a minority culture or twelve. With no OE or separatism, revolts should be infrequent, highly telegraphed, and unlikely to catch you with an army far away from the action. If you are just slow expanding for RP or what have you, you still will face far more revolt issues from your new conquests.
This is also merits the other thing: if you have stable borders you should be fully converted pretty shortly as your expenses should drop when your rate of conquest goes down (e.g. fewer troops lost to wars, sieges, and rebel suppression). Which also ties in with the other element of stable borders: nothing to do with admin points so you may as well just run high stab which in turn makes the place easier to convert. Slower expansion should also result in lower WE so again fewer revolts.
Outside of Confucianism and a few niche cases (like the Revolution), you should basically never have revolts a couple of decades after you stabilize your borders.
And if you have all this trouble, well there is always culture conversion.
There is a sweet spot where you save a bunch of dip points on accepting cultures and have each accepted culture represent a large portion of your dev ... but it is a bit narrow.
There are plenty of cultures with 100-150, or even more, dev out there. Accepting those cultures is more than worth accepting vs culture converting. Having another two is almost always fairly useful but for the tallest of games.
The autonomy reduction, on the other hand, is basically worthless. Most expansion early game is done through vassals which makes the modifier quite literally useless. Later on in the game, you’ll have other sources of ticking autonomy reduction from government rank, economic ideas, and crownland. That means your autonomy will be ticking down at war regardless of reform, meaning that the reform’s only value is from the raw autonomy reduction (as opposed to the utility of having autonomy reduction at war vs having none), and over 40 years of that reduction can be matched by one click of “reduce autonomy”. If that doesn’t illustrate the worthlessness of this reform, I don’t know what will.
The autonomy reduction, on the other hand, is basically worthless. Most expansion early game is done through vassals which makes the modifier quite literally useless. Later on in the game, you’ll have other sources of ticking autonomy reduction from government rank, economic ideas, and crownland. That means your autonomy will be ticking down at war regardless of reform, meaning that the reform’s only value is from the raw autonomy reduction (as opposed to the utility of having autonomy reduction at war vs having none), and over 40 years of that reduction can be matched by one click of “reduce autonomy”. If that doesn’t illustrate the worthlessness of this reform, I don’t know what will.
The thing with the +2 Max Cultures Accepted and -0.05 Monthly Autonomy is that they're both useful, just for different countries.
If you're playing as, say, the Ottomans, you already start out with a cultural union over most of your expansion path, and you've also taken Humanist ideas (probably), meaning that you have 4 acceptable cultures. Taking Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and your choice of Hungarian/Romanian/Transylvanian means that you have no unaccepted cultures in Europe, while your cultural union means the entirety of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and Egypt are accepted too. You most likely will not need any more accepted cultures until you start eating into Persia/Austria/Ethiopia. However, the -0.05 Monthly Autonomy fits great, since you're going to be conquering at light speed with the Ottomans. Taking provinces you have claims on gives them 40% autonomy. This means that without the reform they would take 267 months to reach 0% autonomy, compared to the 200 with it. This means you get the best deal out of your provinces a good 6 years earlier. This gets even better with vassals (E.G. Syria), since diplomatically annexed land starts off at 60% autonomy. At base autonomy reduction they take 400 months to get to 0%, but with the reform they only take 300, meaning you get to 0% autonomy almost a decade earlier.
And this is assuming that you're not constantly at war the whole time, since you only get -0.1 monthly autonomy while at peace. If you're never at peace, conquered lands would take 800 months to reach 0% autonomy, compared to 400 with the reform (35 years saved), while diplomatically annexed land would take a massive 1200 months, compared to the 600 with the reform (50 years saved).
On top of that, since you, along with the majority of the provinces you're surrounded by, start off as Sunni, if you're really tight on culture slots you can convert away a few minor cultures (Luri and Beja come to mind).
HOWEVER,
If you're starting off in a somewhat different situation things get different. Let's say you're playing as Korea. You start out with the worst culture group in the game, while also having a minority religion that fucking kneecaps conversion capability (and also gives you -3 Tolerance of the True Faith and -1 Yearly Legitimacy, just in case you were having too much fun). On top of that, your only expansion path is into heathen/heretic, wrong culture territory. Your biggest problem isn't going to be with reducing autonomy to get the most out of your provinces, but instead to prevent your kingdom from exploding with rebels while also dealing with a basically global -33% tax/manpower modifier. In this case it would be much more advisable to take the +2 accepted cultures. With only the base 2, you'd basically be stuck at Jurchen and Kyushuan, meaning half of Manchuria and 4/5 of Japan are going to be teeming with rebels, while also providing next to nothing due to the aforementioned tax/manpower modifier. And you haven't even invaded China yet. The immediate +33% tax and manpower in this case would be a much better immediate relief than getting more out of your provinces 30 years later.
Culture converting on top of that is just thrown out the window, due to you A. Taking a massive hit to harmony for converting even the smallest of provinces and B. Gaining unrest from converting provinces due to the -3 ToTF, C. The land surrounding you all being high dev, because a mountain province controlled by a horde has higher dev than your capital. Just take the +2 cultures.
This is one of the reform tiers where both choices are pretty balanced, instead of one just being leagues ahead of the rest (I'm looking at you Political Absolutism)
If you're playing as, say, the Ottomans, you already start out with a cultural union over most of your expansion path, and you've also taken Humanist ideas (probably), meaning that you have 4 acceptable cultures. Taking Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and your choice of Hungarian/Romanian/Transylvanian means that you have no unaccepted cultures in Europe, while your cultural union means the entirety of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and Egypt are accepted too. You most likely will not need any more accepted cultures until you start eating into Persia/Austria/Ethiopia. However, the -0.05 Monthly Autonomy fits great, since you're going to be conquering at light speed with the Ottomans. Taking provinces you have claims on gives them 40% autonomy. This means that without the reform they would take 267 months to reach 0% autonomy, compared to the 200 with it. This means you get the best deal out of your provinces a good 6 years earlier. This gets even better with vassals (E.G. Syria), since diplomatically annexed land starts off at 60% autonomy. At base autonomy reduction they take 400 months to get to 0%, but with the reform they only take 300, meaning you get to 0% autonomy almost a decade earlier.
And this is assuming that you're not constantly at war the whole time, since you only get -0.1 monthly autonomy while at peace. If you're never at peace, conquered lands would take 800 months to reach 0% autonomy, compared to 400 with the reform (35 years saved), while diplomatically annexed land would take a massive 1200 months, compared to the 600 with the reform (50 years saved).
On top of that, since you, along with the majority of the provinces you're surrounded by, start off as Sunni, if you're really tight on culture slots you can convert away a few minor cultures (Luri and Beja come to mind).
HOWEVER,
If you're starting off in a somewhat different situation things get different. Let's say you're playing as Korea. You start out with the worst culture group in the game, while also having a minority religion that fucking kneecaps conversion capability (and also gives you -3 Tolerance of the True Faith and -1 Yearly Legitimacy, just in case you were having too much fun). On top of that, your only expansion path is into heathen/heretic, wrong culture territory. Your biggest problem isn't going to be with reducing autonomy to get the most out of your provinces, but instead to prevent your kingdom from exploding with rebels while also dealing with a basically global -33% tax/manpower modifier. In this case it would be much more advisable to take the +2 accepted cultures. With only the base 2, you'd basically be stuck at Jurchen and Kyushuan, meaning half of Manchuria and 4/5 of Japan are going to be teeming with rebels, while also providing next to nothing due to the aforementioned tax/manpower modifier. And you haven't even invaded China yet. The immediate +33% tax and manpower in this case would be a much better immediate relief than getting more out of your provinces 30 years later.
Culture converting on top of that is just thrown out the window, due to you A. Taking a massive hit to harmony for converting even the smallest of provinces and B. Gaining unrest from converting provinces due to the -3 ToTF, C. The land surrounding you all being high dev, because a mountain province controlled by a horde has higher dev than your capital. Just take the +2 cultures.
This is one of the reform tiers where both choices are pretty balanced, instead of one just being leagues ahead of the rest (I'm looking at you Political Absolutism)
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One argument for +2 max promoted cultures is you qualify for the Age objective immediately... but autonomy reduction is king as you said 
I always initially choose autonomy reduction. Autonomy reduction is one of the most important modifiers at the stage of the game where your T3 reform becomes available. Reform progress growth is based solely on your average global autonomy, with only a handful of countries having a modifier to boost it. The ability to help maintain/accelerate reform progress growth is reason enough to pick it. And if you are aggressive about maintaining low autonomy, there is plenty of time before 1610 to finish the entire reform tree and flip T3 reforms in time to qualify for the age objective.
First off most states will hit this choice in the first few decades of the game. Very few will be in a position to make accepting a lot of cultures worth it, but many will be in a position where lowering autonomy faster, particularly without having to spend manpower or ducats on as much rebel suppression, means faster reform progress and those higher tiers are much more valuable than whatever late game efficiency you can eke out. We are talking about how much dev is in your third and fourth cultures, and how much anything will have after you either conquer, form, or dev into a cultural union.
I could see swapping back to it later, but by then, as noted, you can already deal with the revolt risk, have already converted everything, and requires a pretty decent bit of territory if you stabilize borders and slow expansion. This is particularly the case if you are playing heavily with TCs.
I am just not seeing all that many cases where it is worth it to pick it on the first shot through and even to change back later seems to be one of those moves that may min/max but lacks a lot of actual utility by the time you want to do it.