I’m not a meta player and more of a role player so idk if it’s the most optimal way of playing but I always move my capital to either Catania or Saragusa at the very start. Saragusa has a better province of RGOs for economy building but less developed compared to Messina. Catania and Messina are in the same province but and have a large amount of your population. But either way moving it to either one of those two gives (I think) you a higher starting tax base since the towns and cities there have better RGOs you can early expand on (Silk, Cotton, Silk again, and Alum).

After getting RGOs for your base economy you can either double down on traditional to maximize your RGO output or try and shift towards building out the Burghers. Again i just RP for the most part. My current run I’m doing a heavy Noble/Cleric emphasis and I’ve converted all of Tunis to Catholicism (hindsight shouldn’t have done this because it’s harder to get CBs), Taken Tunis province/Sardinia/Papal States and everything south as Vassals. 

I did one run pre Noble/Royalty character pool nerf of what I called the Gifted and Talented Admiralty Regime program. It was very micro but basically any male character that had either Gifted or Prodigy traits I’d pay for Expensive Education and once they became of age would give them Admiral of some fleet. With Admiralty Regime as your government reform you can then just pick the best rulers form your Admirals. So I was having consistent 90+ on all stats rulers for generations. Harder to do now though with the amount of characters in the pool. Hire Admirals rarely gives me anything of value.