One of the last Civilization 6 packs to be released was the Portugal Pack, and besides adding the Portuguese Empire, it also added Zombies as a melee land unique. Zombies are an optional feature that players can activate when setting up a game by turning on the Z ombie Defense game mode.
Even though zombies don't tend to be the smartest supernatural creatures out there, they can be quite handy if they're fighting on the player's side. It's actually possible to take control of zombie units in Civilization 6, and use them against any enemies that might try to stir up trouble.
Zombie Unit Stats
If the player has activated the Zombie Defense game mode before starting the game, they will encounter Zombie units quite often - especially since more of them will spawn whenever a Zombie kills another unit.
Zombies have 2 Movement, 3 Sight, and cost 1 Gold to maintain. At first, they only have 20 Melee Strength, but whenever a Zombie is killed, the mutation becomes stronger and their strength increases +1 every time.
How To Get Zombies
There are a couple of ways to get Zombie units in Civilization 6, and it's useful to know all of them so that the player doesn't miss out on a chance to try this strategy. Here are all of them:
Zombies are hostile units and therefore are considered Barbarian units by the game.
- Apostles: Apostles with the Heathen Conversion promotion can convert all adjacent Barbarian units in exchange for a charge.
- Boudica: The player can retire Boudica, the Great General, to convert all adjacent Barbarian units.
- Hunahpu and Xbalanque (Heroes & Legends game mode): Land units killed by these heroes will go back to full health and movement and will be controlled by the player.
- Unifier Qin Shi Huang: Qin Shi Huang's Unifier persona has the unique Leader Ability Thirty-Six Stratagems which allow his Melee Land units to convert all adjacent Barbarian units.
The easiest way to get a sustainable army of Zombies going is to control Qin Shi Huang, the Unifier, and start converting. Since this leader is able to use any Melee unit to convert Barbarians and given the fact that whenever a Zombie unit takes down another unit, it will come back as Zombie, players can take advantage of this and start snowballing a horde of Zombies.
Using a damaged Zombie to convert a full HP Zombie essentially trades a low-health unit for a full-health unit. The best case scenario is to kill as many Land units to spawn Zombies and get two adjacent Zombies at a time to get a two-for-one conversion.
Civilization 6 is available for iOS, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.