Civ 6 Wonder Placement Guide

St. Basil's Cathedral

Required neighbors are shown on the map — the remaining tiles can be anything.

Placement requirements

Must be adjacent to: City Center

Unlock & cost

Civic: Reformed Church
Production cost: 920

Wonders that compete for the same tiles

From the placement data: these wonders share a placement requirement with St. Basil's Cathedral. A city meant to hold both needs a separate qualifying tile for each.

Eiffel Tower — both next to a City Center
Forbidden City — both next to a City Center

Is it worth building?

Relic slots, doubled religious tourism and tundra-tile bonuses for the host city. The relic cathedral: paired with Mont St. Michel martyrs or Kandy relics it becomes a tourism monster.

Placement & timing tips

City Center adjacency — a tundra-heavy city doubles the value via the tile bonus. Russia builds should consider it core kit.

When to build it — and when not to

Build it when: Build when relics already arrive faster than you can house them — martyred apostles, Kandy gifts — and preferably in a tundra city that turns the tile bonus into real yields.
Skip it when: Skip with no relic source in play — amplified empty slots earn nothing. Renaissance hammers in your culture core go further as an Art Museum, which Great Artists will actually fill.

Which city should build it

The adjacency clause points at the City Center itself, so the wonder takes one of the six first-ring tiles, the same ring that Government Plaza, an Aqueduct on a river, and the city's best early improvements all compete for. With no terrain list in the data, a first-ring hill or even a tundra hill is legal, which is exactly what a Russian tundra capital offers. The natural host is the culture capital that already stacks a Theater Square in ring one; a wonder tile touching that Theater Square lifts its adjacency, and the relics it houses feed the same tourism pipeline. A satellite founded on tundra purely for the tile bonus rarely has the production to finish it.

Winning the race

Reformed Church is off the main civic road, branching from Divine Right and Guilds, so few AIs reach it early and the wonder often sits unclaimed well into the Industrial era; Russia and other religious AIs are the exceptions. As a Renaissance wonder it takes Gothic Architecture, and a first-ring tile is usually close enough to the city's mines to have solid base production. A Renaissance Great Engineer can close it in one turn if the relic haul suddenly justifies rushing. The sign of danger is a religious rival flipping into Theocracy and stockpiling relics themselves, which means both the wonder and the relics you wanted are about to be theirs.

If you lose it: alternatives

Relic housing is the replaceable part: Temples hold one each and the Reliquaries belief multiplies every relic's output empire-wide, which for a three-relic collection beats a single cathedral. Mont St. Michel does the supply side, and a Cathedral worship building adds a religious-art slot in every city with the faith to buy one. The tundra bonus has no substitute except Russia's own Lavra plan or the Dance of the Aurora pantheon, so a tundra city that lost the wonder should lean on those. Redirect the Renaissance hammers into the Theater Square's Art Museum in the same city, and let Great Artists fill what relics would have.

Planning a district next to this wonder? Check its adjacency bonus →

Other wonders of the same era

Related guides

Last reviewed: 2026-10-03