Faith

Chapels, churches and cathedrals gather faith while they are staffed. Faith is kept in one store per lord, shared by every village you hold, the same way gold is. You spend it on monks, who walk the world map like scouts and do a mission where they arrive, and on the Truce of God, a few hours in which no army may fall on one of your villages.

Faith is meant to make the church matter in village life without deciding wars. No mission or effect adds attack or defence to a battle, and the one protection the church gives is short, costly and breaks the moment you send troops out.

The basics

• Each staffed Chapel, Church and Cathedral adds faith every hour. A Wayside Shrine has no priest and adds none.
• Open the Faith panel from the nav bar to see your faith, the monks in each village, monks on the road and every blessing or sermon in force.
• Train monks in a village with a staffed church or cathedral. Each costs goods, faith and a peasant.
• Send a monk from the world map: click a village, a capital or a relic procession and pick a mission under "Monks".
• Faith is paid when the monk sets out. If the mission cannot be done when it arrives (the target changed on the way), all of it comes back. Recalling a monk also gives all of it back.
• Every mission and its effect is logged in your Inbox under World events, and so is anything another lord's monk does to you.

The exact numbers are in the faith reference.

Gathering faith

faith per game hour = sum over religion buildings of (perHour x staffed share) x (1 + research bonus)

A building counts only when it is finished, not paused and has at least one worker. Half staffed, it yields half. The research bonus is the sum of the faith bonuses of the researches you have finished: Holy Relics +10%, Pilgrimages +15% and Illuminated Manuscripts +10% (the research descriptions do not mention this). Your store holds at most 5,000 faith. Faith above that is lost.

Worked example: two chapels and a church, all staffed, give 2 + 2 + 6 = 10 faith an hour. With Holy Relics and Pilgrimages done that is 10 x 1.25 = 12.5 an hour, or 300 a day.

Monks

A monk is trained at once in a village with a staffed church (up to 3 monks) or cathedral (up to 6). The village keeps the higher of the two numbers, and monks out on the road count against it. A monk costs 120 gold, 15 bread, 50 faith and one peasant.

Monks walk 12 cells per game hour, under a quarter of a scout's pace, and storms slow them like scouts. After a mission the monk walks home and is ready again.

Missions

Mission	Faith	Target	What it does
Bless	40	Any village	+4 popularity and +3 Standing for 6 hours
Heal	60	A village struck by plague	Lifts half of the plague's popularity loss and slower arrivals there, for up to 12 hours while the plague lasts
Preach	80	A village of a lord you are at war with	-3 popularity there for 6 hours
Absolve	300 (600 for yourself)	A village of an excommunicated lord	Ends the excommunication
Excommunicate	1,500	A village of a lord with a recent sin	See below
Escort pilgrims	30	A relic procession	+60 Renown, once per procession
Sanctify	250	A capital your guild or a body above it holds	+4 Standing for every village in the territory for 24 hours

Rules that apply to the missions:

• A new blessing on a village replaces the old one, so blessings do not stack. The same goes for a heal.
• Only one sermon can run in a village at a time. A second monk sent to preach there is turned away and its faith returned.
• Preaching needs a war between you and the village's lord, the same check as for attacking it (Guilds and Houses). You cannot preach in your own village.
• Only one sanctification can stand on a capital at a time.
• The monk's target is checked when it sets out and again when it arrives. A blessing for a lord who was excommunicated while the monk walked, or a heal for a plague that ended, fails and the faith comes back.

Worked example (heal): a plague costs -6 popularity and slows arrivals to 70%. A monk's heal gives back 6 x 0.5 = +3 popularity and brings arrivals half way back, to 85%, which the village breakdown shows as an arrival multiplier of about 1.21 on top of the plague's 0.7.

Excommunication

A lord can be excommunicated only for a sin committed in the last 7 days:

• breaking a pact (the lord who pressed "break" as leader or Diplomat), or
• razing a village (winning an attack with the raze goal).

The monk must be sent from a village with a staffed cathedral, and the sin must be named. Each sin can be used once. When the monk arrives, for 72 hours the excommunicated lord:

• earns less Renown: 0.15 is taken off their Renown multiplier, which adds rather than compounds with research and cards (a lord at 1.3 drops to 1.15),
• gains nothing from blessings or a sanctified capital, and cannot send a monk to bless, sanctify or escort,
• cannot call a Truce of God, and a truce already standing over one of their villages ends at once.

The whole realm is told in their inbox. Any lord may absolve them sooner for 300 faith; absolving yourself costs 600. Once an excommunication ends, by absolution or by running out, the lord cannot be excommunicated again for 72 hours, so it cannot be chained.

Your own unspent sins are listed in the Faith panel, so you know what another lord can cite.

The Truce of God

The Truce of God shields one of your villages for 4 hours. Call it from the Faith panel. It needs a staffed church or cathedral in that village and costs 1,000 faith. While it holds:

• no lord can line up or send an attack on the village, and an army or levy host that arrives during it is turned back at the gate without a battle,
• raiders from camps pass the village by.

It breaks at once, with an inbox note, if you send an army from any of your villages or send troops to answer a levy. You cannot call it while any of your armies is marching out. After it ends or breaks you wait 72 hours before calling another, over any village. You cannot call it while excommunicated.

Worked example: an enemy army is 2 hours away from your village. You call the truce. It arrives during the 4 hours and turns back. An hour later you send your own army at a camp, the truce breaks, and the next one may be called 72 hours after that moment.

Interactions

• Popularity: blessings, sermons and heals are lines in the village's popularity breakdown, and blessings and sanctified capitals are lines in its Standing.
• Ranks and Renown: Standing from blessings raises village Renown. Excommunication lowers the Renown multiplier. Escorting pays Renown directly.
• Realm events: heals ease plagues; escorts walk with the relic procession.
• Military: the Truce of God blocks attacks and raids on one village. Faith never changes a battle.
• Musters and levies: a host cannot be called on, or fight at, a village under the truce. Answering a levy breaks your own truce.
• Guilds and Houses: breaking a pact is a sin; preaching needs a war; sanctifying needs your banner to hold the capital.
• World map: monks walk the map and can be clicked and recalled like scouts.

For maintainers

• Numbers: faithContent in server/src/features/faith/content.ts, served as GameContent.faith. Pure sums (villageFaith, researchFaith, monkCap, healOffset, liveSins) in faith/logic.ts.
• State: meta key faith_v1 (faith per lord, monks at home per village, monks on the road, effects, excommunications, grace, sins, truce cooldowns, escorts per procession). Stores are filled on every tick from the buildings' current staffing and saved at most every 30 seconds, so a crash can lose up to 30 seconds of faith.
• Effects reach villages through the feature's modifiers hook: popularity, arrival, renown and a new standing list on Modifiers (server/src/village/sim.ts), added to the Standing breakdown in derive.
• Monks are Movement entries of kind "monk", chained onto worldLive(game).extraMovements after the military feature's.
• The truce: faithApi in registry.ts. Military calls sanctuary in prepareArmy, armyBattle and raidable, and armySent in sendArmy; musters calls sanctuary in checkTarget and armySent in join.
• Sins: socialHooks.pactBroken (raised in the social feature's pactBreak handler) and battleHooks.fought (raised by military after every army or host battle, razes counted from report.razed).
• Tests: server/src/features/faith/faith.test.ts.