What caused the change?
Labs / History
Spread of a Faith
Click to plant a faith's founding city, then watch it spread outward — leaping fastest along dashed trade routes and rivers, and converting people most readily where believers already live. Turn on a rival faith or a mountain barrier and see how geography and competition reshape who ends up believing what.
Labs / History / Spread of a Faith
Spread of a Faith
Click to plant a faith's founding city, then watch it spread outward — leaping fastest along dashed trade routes and rivers, and converting people most readily where believers already live. Turn on a rival faith or a mountain barrier and see how geography and competition reshape who ends up believing what.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
converted 0.0%year 30 CEregion —
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Found the faith at an inland city versus a port on a trade route. Which spreads faster, and why does the sea route matter?
- Turn the conversion rate right down. Does the faith still reach the far coast, or does distance stall it?
- Raise the missionary reach. How does letting believers influence farther-away regions change the shape of the spread?
- Switch on a rival faith. Where does the boundary between the two settle — and can you move your origin to win a contested region?
- Drop a mountain barrier across the land. Which regions stay unconverted the longest, and does a river or route punch through it?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.