Doctrine: C.U.L.T.

Doctrine: C.U.L.T. is a game about building a religion and expanding its influence, from a single city to nations around the world. You recruit followers, shape their beliefs and make decisions that affect your cult, its members and the fate of humanity.

Create a religion

You define your religion’s dogma, rituals and sacred symbols, and shape reality through your followers’ actions. Your faith can be mysterious and open to interpretation, or unyielding and unwilling to compromise. It can be enlightened and merciful or ruthless and despotic, and the world reacts to your decisions.

Lead your followers

You can recruit through preaching, charity or manipulation; build temples; train prophets; control the media; and organize rituals to move crowds. Authority can be difficult to hold: scandals, exposed lies and the death of a follower can threaten your influence. People are unpredictable, and your religion can be too.

Manage crises and factions

A dynamic event system presents choices with benefits and costs, with no guaranteed happy ending. When economic collapse hits, you choose between the community’s poverty and spiritual growth built through exploitation. During an internal schism, you must balance liberal and orthodox factions before they split apart. Natural disasters also test your faith and how you and your followers respond.

Expand across nations

You begin in one city and can extend your influence across nations, each with different traditions, politics and resistance to change. Some countries may embrace your faith, while others oppose it or try to use it for their own ends. You decide whether to adapt your doctrine or remain unbending.

Develop your cult

A skill tree offers three paths: Enlightenment, Materialism and Extinction. You also choose your strategy and leadership style as you shape the world according to your rules.

Faith as currency

Your resources are faith, influence and obedience rather than money. Followers, authority, connections and reputation rise and fall with your decisions. Volunteers can build temples, loyalists can secure favors, insiders can divert supplies, and fear or charity can sway officials.

Resources are limited by population, shifting morality and waning legitimacy. You must keep earning obedience, protecting trust and managing political ties.