Civilization 6: Complete Guide To Religion (2024)

Like its real-world counterpart, religion in Civilization 6 can be a source of revelatory inspiration or catastrophic bloodshed. Founding and developing your empire's faith can shape the way you play the game, providing powerful bonuses and even outlining a path to victory - provided that the priests of other civilizations don't lead your people astray.

While it's possible to win a game of Civ 6 without interacting with the religion mechanics at all, it's a good idea to know how they work and use them to your advantage whenever you can. Read on to find out everything you need to know about religion in Civilization 6.

How To Found A Religion

Before you can start a major world religion, your civilization first needs to develop a Pantheon - a set of early beliefs that will guide them through the dawn of history. You get a Pantheon when your civilization reaches 25 total Faith for the first time. Once that threshold is reached, you can select from any of the Pantheons that haven't already been chosen by another player; that means that the sooner you can get to 25 Faith, the more options you'll have.

Starting a religion takes a bit more work - you need to recruit a Great Prophet by building one or more Holy Sites. Each Holy Site contributes one point per turn towards a Great Prophet, and adds another point if it has a Shrine. You can recruit a Great Prophet once you have sixty Great Prophet points on Standard game speed. You can also speed up recruitment in the following ways:

• Adopt the Revelation Policy for two extra points per turn. In most cases, you'll need to adopt a Classical government, so be sure to research Political Philosophy.
• Spend a lump sum of Gold or Faith to buy out the remaining required Great Prophet points from the Great People screen.
• Build Stonehenge to automatically recruit a Great Prophet.
• If you're playing as Arabia, you'll automatically receive the last available Great Prophet when the second-to-last one is recruited by someone else, provided you haven't already earned one.
• You cannot get a Great Prophet by any means if you're playing as Mvemba a Nzinga of Kongo.

Maximum Number Of Religions

Each map has a limited number of Great Prophets - and therefore, a limited number of religions - available. If they're all gone by the time you would be able to recruit one, you're out of luck. Each player can only recruit one Great Prophet.

In general, the larger the map, the more competition there will be for Prophets.

Choosing Beliefs

Upon activating your Great Prophet, you'll be able to choose a name and symbol for your religion, as well as two Beliefs. Like Pantheons, Beliefs are first-come, first-served - the faster you can start a religion, the more likely it is that you'll get the Beliefs you want.

Your first Belief is always your Founder Belief, which provides a larger bonus the more cities or Citizens are following your religion. This means that it's always beneficial to spread your faith as far and wide as possible, or at the very least to make sure that your own cities are large, numerous, and pious.

Your second Belief, as well as later Beliefs gained through Apostles, can be from one of three categories: Follower Beliefs, Worship Buildings, and Enhancer Beliefs. By the time your religion is complete, you'll have one of each, for a total of four beliefs.

• Worship Buildings are the third and final building available in Holy Sites, providing Faith and a bonus depending on their type. A Holy Site can only build the Worship Building of the religion followed by the majority of its citizens, so a city following a religion other than your own might have a different Worship Building than the one you chose!
• Follower Beliefs are bonuses that apply to any city where the majority of the citizens follow your religion, regardless of whether you control the city or not. If you didn't manage to found a religion, or your founded religion is extinct, try to convert to a faith with Follower Beliefs that are useful to your build.
• Enhancer Beliefs are general-purpose buffs that can help you spread your faith or provide combat bonuses due to religious fervor. They can form a big part of your early-to-mid game strategy if used cleverly.

How To Convert Cities

Once a religion is founded, the city where the Great Prophet was activated becomes that faith's Holy City and begins exerting Religious Pressure on nearby cities. This pressure slowly converts citizens over time. Multiple religions can exert pressure on the same city, which usually results in multiple religions being present there. If more than half of a city's population follows a single religion, that becomes the city's Majority Religion, and it gains the effects of that faith's Follower Beliefs.

You can increase the Religious Pressure on a city by:

• Converting other cities within ten spaces (13 if you have the Itinerant Preachers Belief.)
• Build a Holy Site in a nearby city that has your religion as the Majority.
• Sending Trade Routes to the target city from a city where your religion is the Majority.
• Taking the Scripture Belief. Its effect becomes more powerful once you research Printing Press.

Converting cities via pressure is extremely slow, especially if there are competing faiths exerting pressure at the same time. Missionaries and Apostles add a large amount of Religious Pressure to an adjacent city by spending charges, speeding up the process. They need to be recruited with Faith, so be sure to generate lots of it by keeping your Holy Sites up-to-date.

Inquisitors

If another civilization is trying to convert your cities, it's better to launch an Inquisition than to spend Missionaries trying to re-convert your wayward citizens. Inquisitors remove three-quarters of religious presence other than their own in a city when activated, allowing Religious Pressure from nearby Holy Sites to convert the citizens back. Philip of Spain's leader ability causes Inquisitors to fully remove other faiths from cities.

How To Win A Religious Victory

A player wins a game of Civilization 6 via a Religious Victory is every player still in the game has more than half their cities following that player's founded religion. That's a lot easier said than done, as every player that founded a religion will at the very least be fighting to keep their faith alive at home, to say nothing of spreading it abroad. Winning this way requires an inordinate expenditure of Faith and in most cases a fair amount of military conquest.

While each game is different, here are some tried-and-true tips that will help you unite the world under your One True Faith:

• Spawn lots of Missionaries and Apostles at once, then send them out as a group with Gurus to protect them in Theological Combat. Your targets will have a much harder time recovering from a concentrated conversion than from sending priests one at a time.
• Look for opportunities to win Theological Combat or destroy heretical Missionaries and Aspostles with military units, as doing so adds Religious Pressure to nearby cities while removing pressure from the loser's religion.
• Use the Holy War Casus Belli to eliminate nearby religious rivals early, so that you don't have to focus on protecting your own cities from conversion.
• Target Holy Cities and Holy Sites, both for conquest and conversion, as they generate the most Religious Pressure.
• When you're down to the last few unconverted opponents, you can simply conquer their unconverted cities until more than half their remaining cities follow your religion!