Cultist (Civ6)

Cultist
Support unit
Introduced in Ethiopia Pack
Game mode	Secret Societies
Unique to	Voidsingers
Unique to	Voidsingers
Cost
Faith	110
Faith	110
Maint.	4
Maint.	4
Stats
Movement	2
Movement	2
Sight	2
Sight	2
Notes
Support unit unique to the Voidsingers. Once it dies or loses all charges, its devoted sacrifice awards the player a Relic of the Void. Can move into foreign lands when not at war, and use a charge to Recruit Followers in an adjacent foreign city, causing it to lose 10 Loyalty.

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For the faction from Red Death, see Cultists (Civ6).

The Cultist is a support unit in Civilization VI. It is exclusive to the Voidsingers secret society in the Secret Societies game mode, introduced in the Ethiopia Pack. It can only be purchased with Faith.

• Attributes:
  • Can move into foreign lands without declaring war.
• Abilities:
  • Cause adjacent foreign cities to lose 10 Loyalty (3 Charges).
  • Amount of Loyalty damage can be improved with Dark Summoning project.
  • When it is killed or loses all charges, it grants a Relic of the Void.

Strategy

The Cultist is a rather nasty way to attack a neighbor empire without actually declaring war! They complement the so-called Loyalty flip tactic, by applying direct pressure to the target city. Bide your time, determine which cities may flip under the right circumstances, then prepare a horde of 4 - 5 Cultists. The moment Loyalty pressure in the target city turns negative, send in the Cultists, and 'attack'! If you calculate the moment right, the enemy won't even be able to react by sending a Governor to the vulnerable city.

Due to the latest change regarding Loyalty pressure, a city will no longer flip just because its Loyalty level is brought down to 0. Now, a city also needs to have a negative Loyalty pressure per turn to turn into a Free City, so sending a horde of Cultists to an empire half across the globe where you exert no Loyalty pressure no longer works.

List of Relics of the Void

See Voidsingers (Civ6)

Civilopedia entry

In weird fiction, those that catch a glimpse of ultimate truths go mad. But this madness is of a strange variety, one that does not fragment, but oddly brings together. In H.P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” (1928), a series of horrific dreams links artists with tribal peoples, dreamers and outlaws, all dreaming the same syllables from a dead language. Here, then, madness is not psychopathy, rather, it is a connection with something more fundamental underlying the world, and to become a cultist is to live one’s life according to these, and not society’s, principles.

For scholars of religion, “cult” simply means a religious group focused around one object of worship. We can speak of Catholic “cults” devoted to a particular saint, or Buddhist “cults” that choose a particular teacher, without all of the negative implications that the word has here. Cults can often claim to have a body of knowledge that is particular to that group, and new discoveries often give rise to new cults: the publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, provoked a boom in groups claiming to have privileged access to the knowledge in these texts. The followers of Heaven’s Gate believed that they were receiving messages from a UFO hiding in the tail of a passing comet. The cult Aum Shinrikyo, that released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway, believed itself to be in possession of supreme truth about the nature of the world. In these last two examples, the result was tragedy.

Gallery

Cultist in game