Revolts - Population fall below 5000

[unmerged(3525)]

Well it seems to be an obvious tactic, particularly if you have 5 religions to look after. Just get rid of one using those missionaries. Often it's not so easy if you capture provinces with populations larger than 5000, but since you can't keep everyone happy in this situation, just make the lives of one group absolute misery. A 10% revolt risk of more and they'll soon be out of the street. The resulting unrest will wipe out large groups of the population allowing your missionaries in (and they almost never fail with that 95% success rate).

Therein lies a little problem which I've noticed before in one AAR. Sometimes, the population just falls to 5000 exactly. In converting Armenia (not yet), Uralsk and another Astrkhan province, this happened to me 5 times so I'm sure there's no coincidence. Does anyone know why the population so often seems to stop at 5000 (but sometimes does fall below)?

 

[unmerged(3512)]

The normal penalties to population growth for location etc dissapears at 5000 population. So I'm guessing that it's there as a safeguard (ie harder to drop a population below 700, 1000 and 5000 than it is to drop it from 10k to 9k).

 

[unmerged(2833)]

I've actually managed once to convert province which initially had about 50'000 inhabitants and Cot
Happened in game which I converted half of Europe though.
An about that 5000 limit
after succesful siege, (rebel held city) population always drop by decent amount. But it only drops to 5000. Population can be only diven below 5000 if there is negative population growth, which can be achieved by sieging that province, either by you or rebels
Solution is simple, if you already brought province down to 5000, wait for next revolt, and if population is still below 5050-5100, siege it for a while(or let rebels siege it), then when it drops below 5000, assault and send colonist.It's hard to do in Cot provinces, because of their large growth rate.
Small hint-looted province gives another -5% growth, but if it stopped burning, leave cover force, move main army out and back again.
Repeat till province is looted again.