How to win a religious victory and having fun at the same time (DEITY)

• Get Hercules early
  
• Settle around desert tiles (at least so you have a spot for your Holy Sites.)
  
• Get Eurekas as your way to keep up with the lack of Science and Campuses
  
• Pick Desert Folklore as your Pantheon,
  
• Use Hercules as a instant builder on every Holy Site in the deserts
  
• Pick Work Ethic as the main Religion Belief
  
• Get the Scripture card from the Theology civic and never remove it once obtained
  
• Resummon Hercules every age
  
• When finish booming, build groups of Apostles and convert cities untill you win

I personally feel that Religious victories are the most boring ways to win a game in Civ 6. You neglect science and keep fighting over boring unimportant faith numbers. Also other Civs remove your work in a instant if you don't have enough Apostles and there is a lot of diplomatic trouble forcing on religions to other Civs. But with this Civilization (Babylonia) it's actually entirely different. It's slightly after aggressive snowball Norway my favorite Civ.

To win a game of relgious victory you need to have the majority of all religion in a civilizations empire. Meaning you need more than 50% of the religion in the other players cities.

There are multiple ways to do that, one is by natural spreading, like pressure from different cities with high faith gain, trading, alliances and also by brute force with Missionaries or Apostles.

Apostles are the expansive, but hugely stronger version of missionaries. They can fight Theological combats against other religious units. If they win you get the enemies religion reduced in the cities nearby and your increased at the same time. If the Apostle dies from battle, it gains a relic. So it's a win win. Only problem, they are quite expensive.
Apostles can also be used to increase the strenght of our faith. We will do that 2 times early in the game and from there, only use them for attack.

Missionaries are good converting cities that lack other cities influence. Like new starting cities with no religion in it or established cities with no founded religion. (cities with only pantheons followers) Civilizations that don't focus on faith is a good way to spread faith with missionaries. It's safe and effective. Once the game goes on, you want Apostles to defend your faith and more effective spreading.

Guru are also one that you can buy, and they are decent effective. Good when you have multiple battles so you can heal up, but they can't do much other than healing a few turns, so I mostly don't use them. In most games I'll buy 1 or maybe 2 Gurus in total. I win with numbers with Apostles.

Once you win over every city a enemy have, they can not produce religious units to remove the faith you have achived. The only way for it to get away is other Apostle from different civilizations. Try not to use the last spread from an Apostle as they are more useful to die as a martyr and get a relic or fight of incoming civilizations that ruin your achivements.

In this guide I will use the brute force of Apostle to win, and I will mostly only use Missionaries to spread faith within my own empire.

Ancient Era

Build a Sabum Kibittum and use it for scouting and then go for Monument. You can build a extra unique unit if you have high production and still not found Hercules, a slinger for getting archery is also nice. If you are feeling secure enough, you can also rush for an early settler.

Since you are playing Hammurabi, you need to get Eurekas to get techs, so keep a extra look for:

• a natural wonder (unlocks Astrology) "super important"
  
• Barbarians to kill (unlocks Bronze working, potentially archery)

And since you are scouting for Hercules you also need to look for

• Tribal Village (15% chance).
  
• City states (10% chance each envoy you send).
  
• Getting enough envoys to be Suzerain of a city-state (100% chance).
  
• Discovering a Natural Wonder or a Continent (50% chance)

Research order

1. Animal Husbadry
2. Mining
3. Pottery

After that, it's not a big deal what you research, but try to work on the ones that you most likely will never be able to get eurekas for. Iron working or Horseback riding depending what you have close to you. (iron or horses) Try to get all the eurekas you can. All in the ancient era are equally important/unimportant. Later it is easier to see what will be hard to come by. Most of your research will be done by eurekas.

Civics:
You are going for a relgious victory, so anything containing religious benefits are important.

Long term most important civics to get:

• Early Empire and state workforce (For governor title x2)
  
• Theology (for the scripture card that is insane important for this tactic to work.
  
• Political Philosophy (for Goverment level 2)
  
• Feudalism (For good worker card)
  
• Reformed Church (for getting ready to pump out those Apostles and for the Simultaneum and the religious order card, both very strong)

Governor:
If you managed to pick up 2 governor titles along the way, pick it on Magnus and chose Provision as the main promotion. You will soon pump out settlers like you are a baby machine.

Pantheon:
Pick: Desert Folklore.
Get a early pantheon by using the god king card as a policy card. If you have Hercules and a desert area with 4 tiles (or preferably more) adjacency to the holy site location. (SUPER IMPORTANT) You can build your holy site there and have Hercules instant complete it.

Also if you have him, you can now go to the next section. The tactic can begin.
If the ancient age is ending and if you have still to recruit Hercules before the age ends, I suggest you restart. I would have restarted earlier, but you do you)

Ok. So now I assume you have following.

- Hercules reqruited (or at least discovered and not taken by other civs)
- Big desert locations to expand to.
- Pantheon (Desert Folklore)
- Hopefully Governor Magnus with Provision promoted.
- Ancient age soon over and you are on the route to golden age. (achiving golden age at first age is simple as long as you get eurekas and explore naturally)

Moving to the desert
Deserts are known for having little to no gain from their tiles, building cities in deserts take long time before they get decent and though they are useful late game for cultural victories, they are only better than snow tiles overall. Meaning, very few civs focus on desert location so expanding there should be easy to get the location

Plan the cities and your holy sites
Since you have Hercules he can instant build whatever districs he wants on one turn. Meaning you can get a Holy Site on turn one from a city that usually only have 1 or 2 production (usually cost 70+ turns to build)
Try planning the areas where you can maximize the number of cities. (4 tiles from each other and have areas for the Holy Sites that have 4 or more adjacency tiles of deserts to it. Natural wonders help big time as well, adjecency to other Holy Sites or districs also helps.
Here is a view of maximizing the effect.
And here is how it usually ends up.

Build a settler or two and take the best places. Put down you holy sites. Have Hercules instant build them and when he have used all his charges, set him to explore or defeat some Barbarians.

Founding a religion
Since you have so many holy sites early, getting a Great Prophet should be easy.
You will now pick:
Work Ethics (incredible important)
Depending what you get, it varies from time to time:
Holy Order (useful pick)
Mosque (extra spread and more faith, yes please)
Lay Ministry, Pilgrimage or Tithe. Depend what's available and what you lack. I personally prefer Lay Minstry, but Pilgrimage and Tithe are also very strong.

The Work ethics get you the same adjacency bonus as the faith have for the Holy Sites. If you have holy sites with +6 or more. You get +6 or more production in that tile to the city. That's very strong.
But wait, there is more. Now with the religion, you should have gained the Scripture Card from the Theology civic. Put that on if you have not done so already. Now instead of +6 Faith you have +12 faith. Buuuuut you also have +12 production. That's insane.

So a 1 or 2 population city have 12 production or more from the start. That's like 4 lumber mills tiles from one tile and it does not even cost food.

The best of all: This can also improve through the game. This screenshot was from the same game and look at the numbers.

22 production on a desert tile is insane. And I have 5 other cities with basically the same. On turn 160 I generate 514,8 faith pr turn. It's ridicolus.

New age.
Ok, so now it's time to go to the next age if you have not done so already. I assume you managed a golden age. Nice. If not, it will be a bit slower as you have to build your settlers.
Now pick Momentum. (buy settlers and workers for faith, for 30% cheaper as well)

You can from this point build settlers from the faith you have.
Build a Goverment Plaza and pick the Ancestral Hall. You are now soon going to vomit out settlers so be prepared.

If you have the production available while you wait for faith to be gained, you can build something that reduce the cost of your Hero resurrection. I recommend the Oracle. It's a great wonder in itself. It's a popular wonder with the AI, so either rush for it while chopping forests or simply ignore it. Keep in mind to place it next to districs, so you can get more great person points.
I also recommend buying Shrines and Temples along with other Faith buildings in the Holy Site. You want to get as much faith as possible.

Spawn those settlers (at least 3 right away) from the City with Magnus in and place them in the best deserts location available. Remember to spend the faith left to reqruit Hercules again. After these 3 you should now have at least 6 cities in total and with every city access to a at least +4 faith spot. But most on +6 or better. Best I have seen so far are 9+. (All desert tiles + natural wonder x2.)

That should leave you a faith gain by 100-140 pr turn (around 70-90 from Holy sites+ buildings and eventually wonders)
Improve the cities by getting workers and building buildings. If you have the serfdom card, I urge you to use it.

Continue building settlers from your faith. You can go for the Petra in the most desert tiled city if you like. It's incredible in this game. Normally in most games, you can't really max benefit from a Petra, as most cities need regular fields to be productive enough to build the Petra before some other steal it. In this game with Hercules and Production you get from the Holy Site, you can easy get it in 10-30 turns. 400 production cost and you get 14-15 from just one tile.

Now you start to spawn out settlers untill the new age. Since Hercules ability is off untill the new age (when you can reqruit him again) you can now look for other places that's not particulary desert cities and can have some production from start. Keep in mind that there are multiple eurekas that require different types of Cities.

Also remember to save some faith to buy Missionairies to get the faith in your new cities. If you don't, they don't get the +bonus production from your religion. You can also look for some Apostles now if you have the faith to spend.

If the AI is sending missionaries toward you already, use the Apostles to defence. They are most likely sending Missionaries so it should be a one-sided fight for you.

Improve Religion
Use Apostle to Evangelize Belief. The religion you pick is not very important and it really depend what is left to get. I prefer either something that improve the holy site adjecency bonus, like the Lay Minstry Founder Beliefs. You might already have that depending what the second bonus was, if you do, Mosque or Holy Order are ideal to get.

NOTE: you can also get aditional heroes when you are building Cities. I recommend either Sinbad (if continent or similar water maps) for exploration and massive gold income, Maui for improving desert tiles even more, Himiko for getting City States or/and Sun Wukon (if you ever want to get into a war and harvest faith, invisible)

Continue playing as you see fit. At this stage of the game I'm still exploring and building cities. I'm usually very expansive and play tall. More cities > big cities. More cities means more cities I can place holy sites for extra faith.

Next era.
Depending how done you are with settling lands you can go now either continue settling and expanding (picking Monumentality as your dedication) or you can now go on the offence by spreading your faith. By picking up Exodus of the Evangelists. Converting cities are a gold mine for faith as well, so you can safely pick this if you are not planning 7-10 new cities the next 30 turns.

Even still, remember to pick up Hercules again and build Holy Sites where you need it. Let's continue to the last part. Winning the game.

It's technically not late game, as this will be way over before late game if you have done everything correct. Should be around turn 100-120 now, but it might varies depending on you, the game speed and the AI.

Anyway, you are now at a point where you are going to overturn the cities. Start by saving up to 2K faith or more. Build 6+ Apostles and send them the direction you want to attack. Save up again to 2-4K (6+ Apostles) and repeat. (as Apostles get more expansive you need more faith each section.)

TIP: Get the Faith governor Moksha in one of your Apostle production cities. Patron Saint is the one promotion you should aim for. One extra spread is simply gold.

Who to start with?
I recommend to target the ones that either have tons of faith and are a potential long term threat, or the ones that have no religion (only because it's fast to spread to them). Either way I suggest to go to the closest Civ and expand onward in a orderly fashion. The reason you want to go in big groups of Apostles is that you primarily want to win Theological fights if you can, so that in mind, you should never use the last charge of an Apostle. Keep it around so you can battle other Missionaries, Apostles and Gurus untill it eventually dies or you win.
By going in big groups you also remove the chance of Apostles sneaking behind you and removing your converted cities.

NOTE: You can also bring with you a missionary and a guru (or two.) Missionaries are cheap and good to spread religion in cities without faith, and gurus are great for healing up Apostles if you ever need it. Not super important, but worth thinking about.

Your Faith income should be so high that even Apostles get more expansive for each one you buy, there should not be more than 10-20 turns before a new group can be produced.

Promotions on Apostles Tier list
SS tier:
Debater (stronger units overall is the most important thing about a Apostle.)

S tier:
Translator (stronger spread is massive important)
Proselytizer (Very strong against the biggest cities, like the capitals, but also against all cities)

S tier borderline:
Pilgrim (Depends, if you have a wonder on your way, it's good, if not it's basically useless. Most likely there will always be a wonder on the way so mostly S tier)

A tier:
Orator (More spread is good)

B tier
Chaplain (somewhat nice, but rarely used.)

C tier
Heathen Conversion (Few places you are going where this is useful)
Indulgence Vendor (Though gold are nice, you don't need it now)
Martyr (I think this is already included)

Soon you will have covered the entire world in your faith, but before that you will be targeted by the world congress and grievances from other Civs that don't like your faith. Try having alliances before you start converting cities if you can and never apologize for spreading religion. If they attack you, you should have more than enough production and gold to defend yourself, while the faith can continue to build Apostles.

Now you should be close to winning the game and you did so by having an awesome game with wonders, expansion and high production. The turns should ideal be around 150-170 on standard map size and speed. If you used longer time that's totally ok, if you used shorter time, well you certainly mastered this game.

Hope you all that managed to read this guide learned something.
There will be spell errors for sure, but that's how it is with secondary languages.

Have a great day and hopefully 2021 and onward will be a better than 2020 for us all.
Take care.