- Limit Innovativeness gain and loss to your own Tech group
This means that Frankfurt in the Western group taking a tech
11 years early would no longer effect the Innovativeness gain of Jaunpur in the Indian group taking the same tech. This would somewhat alleviate the issue of OPM's taking techs super early, while also making Innovativeness a mechanic that isn't completely useless for anyone that's outwith Europe. This would also negate the Innovativeness loss from neighbouring a nation with higher tech than you, if they have a different tech group. Thus, Spain colonising Tulangbewang will no longer cause Palembang to start bleeding 3.6 Innovativeness per year.
Currently the passive gain/loss is based off the same conditions as getting the neighbor tech discount IIRC, which to me seems like a reasonable way to handle that aspect, as you can't really foster the sort of culture of independent and creative thinking that helps spur innovation if much of your advancement comes from copying your neighbors methods, and if you are in a situation where your innovativeness is getting tanked by suddenly having a far more advanced neighbor, that is a small price to pay for being able to surge ahead of your old neighbors in tech.
You also get some serious wonkyness from judging it based soley on tech group if say, a particular country were the *only* tag of its tech group, anatolian being the most likely to have this happen. In that case, said tag would *always* get innovativness from everything, no matter how behind everyone else they actually are, which would be a really dumb way to buff ottomans. Also decently likely to have this happen are the central and western african tech groups, as well as andean and mesoamerican.
I can get the frustration with random hre opms, but I think a better solution would be to make the system work like "first to take tech, or taking the tech while it is at least 60% ahead of time" or something like that, maybe with the people coming a bit later getting somewhat less innovativeness.
- Innovativeness now scales to negate the penalty for taking Tech early
Every 10 points of Innovativeness would negate a year of taking tech early. This means that if you have 50 Innovativeness in 1630, you would be able to take tech 18 without any penalties, instead of having to wait until 1635, while having 100 would let you take it in 1625, an entire decade before anyone else. This would also have the effect of allowing already innovative nations to snowball their Innovativeness, which would make far more sense. A country that has been the pioneer of technology for 200 years would be far better at innovating new things than a random HRE OPM that has decided to take one tech early.
This is a really, really absurdly massive bonus, and I am reasonably sure it would also make the "random opm" thing much worse in many cases, as well as giving a huge advantage to anyone who gets good rulers either by luck or tag early on. For example, taking tech every 13 years for 999 mp, ie taking every tech as early as your cost reduction modifiers will allow, only takes ~6.4 monarch points per month.
While this is a lot for a rapidly expanding tag, which players generally are, to afford, it is entierly doable for someone who has nothing better to spend their points on and has an average ruler. Lets imagine two nations, nation A and nation B, with identical 3/3/3 rulers. One of them, country A, expands fairly rapidly, gaining 100 dev per decade, costing them about 140 monarch points a year out of their 252 gained from 3 base + 3 ruler + 1 estate, while country B just sits there doing absolutely nothing, but taking tech as soon as they possibly can every time.
Obviously, Country B is going to take tech much earlier, and thus gain more innovativness. Sure, their dev isn't going up, and country A will eventually be able to afford better advisors and have more monarch points total, but that means nothing to country B's ability to take take first. Why? Because they were already taking tech at the cost of the max amount of points that they could store, so monarch point gain rate means nothing. However, because their ahead of time penalty keeps getting smaller and smaller as they gain more innovativeness, now that 999 cost tech for them costs country A over 999 points, so even if country A tried to beat country B to a tech, they can't actually do it, since they can't store the points. So, after say 50 years of doing nothing, country B can now essentially lock out every other country, or at least every country that isn't also doing nothing, from getting innovativness from taking tech for as long as they exist, unless another country gets behind them on institutions, and uses the fact that mp cap increases more than tech cost to get a tech ultra ahead of time at enormous cost. Basically, you would be creating a scenario where random ass opms are the only nation with rapid innovativness gain after the first couple techs, as no one else can actually take tech earlier than them, no matter how much resources they are willing to devote to it, barring abusing the already weird interaction between innovativness and institutions.
Then of course there is the second point, the fact that being able to take techs 10 years earlier for free is stupidly powerful in its own right. Typically there are times where taking a miltech 5-6 years early is worth doing, because the breif window of substantially greater power is worth losing out on things like wall breaches, general rolls, or manpower dev. With 10 years off ahead of time penalties, you could easily *always* be one tech ahead of everyone who doesn't have similarly super high levels of innovativness, and 2 techs ahead on the occasions where you are willing to throw in some extra points. That would essentially make having high innovativness one of if not the best military bonus in the game, since the previously disscussed point cap would make it impossible for someone with zero innovativeness to avoid being behind on high value techs like mil 15 for several years, easily long enough to get trounced by a nation with half their army size.
The institution spread boost isn't a bad idea. I'm not sure I would go 1 to 1, and I frankly really want to change the way institution spread and embracement as a whole work before throwing big modifiers into the mix, but eh, its a flavorfull and sufficently harmless bonus, so if they added it I wouldn't complain.
No comment on the revolution mechanics, haven't really played with that system myself so I don't have anything to add for or against.
- Innovativeness now modifies army professionalism gain
An innovative army open to reforms is more likely to keep up with the latest standards, than an army that has been stagnating due to conservative, old-age military leaders. Innovativeness will now give a scaling 1:1 army professionalism bonus modifier, meaning that at 100% Innovativeness hiring generals will give +2 professionalism, and drilling your entire force limit would give +2 yearly professionalism.
So, issue with this one is largely related to slacken recruiting standards. Essentially, by doubling professionalism gain, you half the cost of slackening, which means the conversion of military points to manpower becomes far more efficient. In fact, with the nobility privilege that lowers general costs, combined with the 10% all power cost savings from 100 innovativness, you could triple your manpower gains for around 80 mil points a year, which is kind of nuts, and also the exact same type of issue that lead to the general discount from professionalism getting moved from 80% to 100% professionalism, as it made slackening far too powerful at the lower value. And, because getting 100% professionalism is already quite doable without that increase, this buff would serve primarily to encourage that sort of behavior, rather than rewarding nations with lots of innovativness with a higher capacity to benifit from drilling or any of the other things high professionalism does. Perhaps something like increased drill speed, better rates of general skill gain from drilling, etc. would work better while fitting the whole "unconventional/indirect combat buff" angle?
So, lastly, I'd like to leave off with a suggestion of my own, as well, yeah innovativeness is currently a pretty meh system, which would be giving innovativness an advisor cost reduciton modifier. I think its reasonably intutitve/flavorful, as generally the best scholars flock towards well established places of learning in hopes of getting to work on the bleeding edge of science, and it would give an inherently self limiting bonus useful to all but the largest and smallest of tags.
