Civ 6 Wonder Placement Guide
Kotoku-in
Required neighbors are shown on the map — the remaining tiles can be anything.
Placement requirements
- Must be adjacent to: Holy Site (with Temple)
Unlock & cost
- Civic: Divine Right
- Production cost: 710
Wonders that compete for the same tiles
From the placement data: these wonders share a placement requirement with Kotoku-in. A city meant to hold both needs a separate qualifying tile for each.
- Hagia Sophia — both next to a Holy Site
- Mahabodhi Temple — both next to a Holy Site
- Meenakshi Temple — both next to a Holy Site
Is it worth building?
Faith payouts and free Warrior Monks — a bridge between a faith economy and a real army. Useful for religious empires that expect to fight, or Grand-Master's-Chapel-style faith-military builds.
Placement & timing tips
Holy Site adjacency. Worth it only when your faith income is already strong and you intend to spend it on units; pure-tourism faith empires have better uses.
When to build it — and when not to
- Build it when
- Build when a big faith income meets an approaching war — with a Grand Master's Chapel a faith-bought army can appear within a few turns of purchases, and this widens that pipeline.
- Skip it when
- Skip when your faith already has a peaceful destination — naturalists, Great People, spreading religion. If units are the goal but faith is thin, an Encampment with gold purchases arms you faster.
Which city should build it
Its faith bonus scales with the host city's own faith, so it wants your best Holy Site: high adjacency from mountains, woods or a river, a Temple already standing, and ideally a Work Ethic-style belief that turns that adjacency into production too. But the unit half of the wonder rewards a different geography: its free Warrior Monks appear in this city, so the perfect host is a strong Holy Site city near your frontier that also carries an Encampment or at least a road to the front. Interior capitals satisfy the faith condition and fail the logistics one; a second-ring border city often satisfies both. Keep one tile next to the Holy Site free, and remember the Temple prerequisite blocks the wonder until the district's second building is finished.
Winning the race
Rarely contested. Divine Right lies off the AI's main civic route, and at that stage few AI cities have a Temple beside a legal tile; Hojo Tokimune builds it with some consistency, and even he is in no hurry. The real competition is internal: it shares the civic with Mont St. Michel, and a medieval Holy Site city seldom has the hammers for both. So time the start to need rather than to availability: begin when a war that will be fought with faith-bought units is visible on the horizon, and finish before it starts. There is no reason to spend a Great Engineer here. The losing sign is the clock, not a rival: if the war ends before completion, or the faith has been spent on Great People in the meantime, the finished wonder has nothing to do.
If you lose it: alternatives
The free units are easy to replace with faith purchases. The Theocracy government cuts faith purchases on its own, the Grand Master's Chapel in the Government Plaza opens faith purchase of land units, and the Monumentality dedication in a golden age covers civilian units; stacked together they produce a faith army with no wonder at all. On the faith side, the Temple, Work Ethic and relic slots in the same Holy Site carry that load. Send the freed hammers into the border city's Encampment and Barracks, because faith-bought units still need the experience and production bonuses an Encampment provides to be worth their cost. If your game leans toward a religious victory, do not replace it; give that Holy Site's spare side to Mont St. Michel instead.
Planning a district next to this wonder? Check its adjacency bonus →
Other wonders of the same era
Related guides
- Wonder Priorities by Era: When to Contest, When to Let GoAn era-by-era framework for wonder decisions in Gathering Storm: which races are worth entering under each victory plan, how to read whether the AI will beat you, and what to build instead when you pass.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03
- Industrial Zones and Production Planning: Adjacency, Regional Reach, Power, and ChopsHow production actually gets made in Gathering Storm: what feeds Industrial Zone adjacency, how one Factory serves several cities, when power starts to matter, how to chop without wrecking appeal, and the sequencing mistakes that cost the most.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03
- Early District Planning: The First 100 TurnsHow to read city sites for future adjacency, decide between settling for yields now or reserving tile clusters, and know when a planned layout should be abandoned.Last reviewed: 2026-10-03
Last reviewed: 2026-10-03