Voidsingers (Civ6)

Voidsingers
Introduced in Ethiopia Pack
Game mode	Secret Societies

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The Voidsingers are one of four Secret Societies in Civilization VI, exclusive to the Secret Societies game mode, introduced in the Ethiopia Pack. They are a nihilistic cult of dark elder gods. They focus on religion, Relics, and (dis)loyalty.

Introduction

Voidsingers icon

It started with a dream of the sea. The waves surged towards the shore, but refused to break upon the sand, the water's surface having turned to something more like skin. A vast dark shape moved underneath, its form constantly growing new limbs and resorbing old ones. On the wind, there was a song that whispered to you its name, a set of syllables not designed for human tongues. The next day, in the market, you overhear a young urchin with a hollow stare mutter something in the same language.

After Joining

Our world is shallow - theirs is deep. You have opened your mind to the song of the void and accepted its truth. The Old Ones are sleeping, but we can hear their dreams. What seems to be madness is a higher truth. We wait and watch the sea and sing their praises.

Overview

Similar to the other Secret Societies, Voidsinger membership lasts the entire game. Once joined, players will unlock a new Governor with four unique titles. This Governor operates on a national scale, thus granting bonuses to the entire empire without being assigned to a city.

Voidsinger membership unlocks the Old God Obelisk, which replaces the Monument. It has all of the Monument's base effects, and provides additional Faith and a Great Work slot. The Voidsingers also have a unique unit, the Cultist. Purchased with Faith, Cultists can spend a charge to recruit followers in enemy cities, reducing the target city's Loyalty by calling its citizens to madness. This Loyalty damage can further be improved by a unique project called Dark Summoning, and when Cultists die, they leave behind a Relic of the Void which provides +4 Faith and +12 Tourism. Also, Voidsinger members are rewarded with extra Gold, Culture, and Science based on their Faith generation.

The Voidsingers' base chance of sending an invitation after you discover a Tribal Village is 70%. However, as with other societies, this chance will get slightly smaller with every other civilization that joins this society (meaning "popular" societies will be less likely to send you an invitation).

Titles

Promotion Title	Unlocked by	Effect
Melody	Discover a Tribal Village (70% chance).	Allows you to construct the Old God Obelisk building, a powerful replacement of the Monument.
Chorus	Reach the Medieval Era.	Cities earn Gold, Culture and Science per turn equal to 20% of their Faith per turn rate.
Canticle	Reach the Industrial Era.	Unlocks the Cultist unit. This unit is purchased with Faith, and uses charges to reduce Loyalty in foreign cities and generate Relics of the Void.
Symphony	Reach the Atomic Era.	Unlocks Dark Summoning, a city project that provides lots of Faith while active, and upon completion, raises the amount of Loyalty damage done by Cultists.

Strategy

The Voidsingers are a solid society whose bonuses assist with multiple victory conditions. Gaining membership is relatively easy, and their unique infrastructure becomes available sooner than any other society's and does not require a district to build. +4 Faith in each city is a massive bonus in the early game, and will help members found a pantheon before all the best ones are taken. While the extra Faith encourages members to found a religion and spread it aggressively, they can instead save it and use it to patronize Great People or purchase Rock Bands later in the game. Voidsinger members can focus on either a Religious Victory or a Cultural Victory rather easily (especially thanks to the Old God Obelisk's slot for Great Works of any type), and the two will go hand in hand if they build Holy Sites and Theater Squares in every city.

Late in the game, members of the Voidsingers can run Dark Summoning projects and use their Cultists to help launch Loyalty attacks against their neighbors' cities, adding them to their empire without even having to go to war. However, due to the latest change regarding Loyalty pressure, a city will no longer flip just because its Loyalty level is brought down to 0: you also have to exert enough Loyalty pressure on the city to make it lose Loyalty, making Cultists harder to use. Moreover, purchasing Cultists is just a waste of Faith and Gold maintenance in a multiplayer game - no human player will be inept enough to let their City Centers be surrounded by Cultists and allow them to freely wreak havoc inside their empires. All told, while the Voidsingers are a better choice in single player games, their first two bonuses are still strong enough to warrant a pick in multiplayer games. Their preferred victory conditions are pretty hard to achieve in multiplayer games anyway, so you should use your extra Faith, Science, Culture, and Gold for something else.

Recommended civilizations

The Voidsingers' bonuses initially have strong synergy with Menelik II's leader ability, providing any cities he founds on Hills with Science and Culture output bonuses equal to 35% of their Faith output. After entering the Industrial Era and unlocking Cultists, they are also very useful to the Kongolese, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Jadwiga, all of whom can make better than average use of the Relics created when they lose Cultists. Any civilizations with religious and/or cultural tendencies, such as the Egyptians, the Khmer and the Māori, are generally safe picking the Voidsingers.

Despite having no bonuses towards a Religious or a Cultural Victory, Rome under Trajan also works exceptionally well with the Voidsingers. As a member of this society, the "free real estate" from his leader ability will provide every city he founds or conquers with an Old God Obelisk. If you put a little bit of effort into founding a religion in the early game, with the powerful Legion, you can speed up conquest/conversion tremendously. In the midgame, you can build the Grand Master's Chapel to convert your excessive Faith income into a huge army, the Gold maintenance of which will be paid by the Voidsingers' Ritual title. Keep up your Faith output by building Holy Sites and you will be unstoppable.

Civilopedia entry

In the early 20th century, a new genre of science fiction and fantasy began to take hold, especially in the United States and UK. The horrors of World War I had proven that a new, scientific age could potentially be an inhuman one, and the universe revealed by exploration and scientific inquiry could be just as profoundly uncaring about humanity and its hopes and dreams. In addition, for citizens in colonizing countries, a growing awareness that the colonized world could in fact return to haunt the colonizers lent itself to a kind of isolationism – something helped along by that era’s virulent racism. The speculative worlds that emerged in the fiction of authors such as Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, and others were neither the morally-tinged Gothic nor the heroic tales of exploration of the 19th century, but something more disturbing, a new, “weird” fiction.

A weird reality is one where the powers that shape the world are fundamentally uncaring and even hostile to humanity. While their inattention allows us to exist in the world today, traces of them might persist in forgotten places, drowned cities, or in the spaces between the stars, and might be revealed by science’s forward progress. In weird fiction, the world is one where we do not belong, and only the mad would actually seek out the things that make the world work.

List of Relics of the Void

• A Journal of Next Year's Dreams
• Black Goat's Horn
• Child of Azathoth
• Chorus of the Drowned
• Chronicle of Descent
• Cup of the Star-Spawn
• Foundation Stone
• Fragment of Akkorokamui
• Fungal Spore
• Hint Guide: Civilization II
• Instructions for the Kumanthong
• Memoirs of a Blind Astronomer
• Rangda's Chalice
• Relic of the Devouring Angel
• Relic of the Sightless Worm
• Shard of Yog-Sothoth
• Teachings of the Worm
• The Book of Dead Names
• The Dream-Eater
• The Left-Hand Sutra
• The Loveless Ones
• The Shrieking Flowers
• The Singing Worm
• The Tome of Dagon
• Vessel of Nyarlathotep

Related achievements

Dead But Dreaming Earn all Governor promotions for the Voidsingers Secret Society. The Voidsingers are based on the cults from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. One of the iconic lines from The Call of Cthulhu is 'In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'