How do i lover consciousness and keep it down

Consciousness is actually good in the sense that it increases plurality and plurality is the most important factor in research point accumulation. Consciousness also moves people to vote other parties than conservatives, which then again is pre-requisite for being able to reform. When you have reforms in place the people tend to stay and even migrate to your country.

In general population early game is easiest to increase by researching medicine. It has truly awesome set of inventions.

Personally I'd say don't worry about consciousness at all.

In my current (/1st) game as Japan I used national focus as soon as I recalled there is such a feature in the game, to back the people to become priests, until I got around 2% priests in every state (Japan starts with 8-10 states I think). Until 1871 when the overall people's draw towards liberalism starts slowing down, this was enough to battle consciousness.

Still, while the percentage of liberals among the people remained low, the percentage of upper house memebers who wished political reforms allowing landed voting was increasing. The aristocratic buggers wanting a share of the government's power. Since I was already getting jacobin revolts every other year, I conceded to the reform as soon as the liberals had the majority in the upper house. It is rather annoying and confusing to have to wait for the upper house to be supporting reforms when you are an absolute monarchy.

To answer your question -- encourage pops promoting to priests and increase spending on literacy. The clergy handles education of the masses as well as decreasing their consciousness in Victoria II (a little paradox), so increasing spending there, should increase pops' desire to become priests.

do get social reforms demanded, switch ruling party as hm goverment several times on the same day. This makes pops militant , but after annecting a reform it will lower the militancy to about the same lvl as before. So i got about 1865 many social reforms passed with my conservative ruling party . Conservatives will allow it, when mil hits the 6.

I know its abuse , but may switching ruling party should have a one month pause until to do it again.

It is said that more clergymen you have, then less of consciousness you get...
All written in manual :: http://wizzywizzyweb.gmgcdn.com/media/products/victoria-ii/manual/victoria-ii_manual.pdf

Though you actually WANT consciousness to rise. What you do not want is militancy.

AlknicTeos said:

do get social reforms demanded, switch ruling party as hm goverment several times on the same day. This makes pops militant , but after annecting a reform it will lower the militancy to about the same lvl as before. So i got about 1865 many social reforms passed with my conservative ruling party . Conservatives will allow it, when mil hits the 6.

I know its abuse , but may switching ruling party should have a one month pause until to do it again.

Click to expand...

You can only switch parties once per year...

Yep, what two years and a number of patches can do...

Klausewitz said:

Though you actually WANT consciousness to rise. What you do not want is militancy.

Click to expand...

It depend on your geographical location. In Europe for example, consciousness increase emigration witch is quite bad. Militancy is not a real problem if your peoples are getting their needs since it will disappear fast. Consciousness on the other hand tend to be quite hard to loose. In general I prefer to keep consciousness as low as possible when I play an European nation in order to stop the emigration flow as much as possible.