A Civilization V civilization built entirely around the raze mechanic. You cannot keep what you conquer.
"They came not as conquerors who hold, but as wolves who take and leave only ash. What Rome had built in centuries, Genseric unmade in a fortnight." — Chronicler of the Sack of Rome, 455 CE
Most conquest civs are about accumulating cities. This one takes the opposite position: every city you capture burns, and the empire you end up with is the one you founded yourself. Warfare stops being expansion and becomes extraction.
Conquered cities cannot be kept. Every capture is forced into raze mode immediately.
When the raze completes, you receive a one-time payout in each of Gold, Science, and Culture:
bonus = cityYieldPerTurn × cityPopulation × 5
floor = cityPopulation × 5 (per bucket, so even a starved city pays)
Every tile improvement in the ruins is destroyed along with the city.
The practical effect is that a rich, developed target is worth far more than a size-3 border town — you are paid for what the city was, so the incentive is to let an opponent build before you take it.
Replaces the Horseman.
| Movement | 3 (vs 2) |
| Promotion | Marauder's Instinct — +15% Combat Strength in enemy territory |
| Requires | Horses |
Built to reach cities fast, because the sack cycle only pays once the raze finishes.
Replaces the Barracks.
| Cost | 50 production (vs 75) |
| Maintenance | None (vs 1 Gold) |
| Yields | +15 XP · +3 Gold · +1 Happiness |
The Gold and Happiness are what keep a deliberately small empire viable when you are razing rather than annexing.
Civilization V: Gods & Kings or Brave New World. The unique ability is
implemented in Lua and depends on GameEvents.CityAcquired,
CityAcquiredAndKept, and PlayerDoTurn, which the base game does not expose.
Copy the repository into your Civilization V mods directory, then enable Vandals (Genseric) from the in-game Mods menu.
| Platform | Path |
|---|---|
| Windows | Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS\ |
| macOS | ~/Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS/ |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS/ |
Raze bonuses do not survive a save/load. The mod tracks in-flight razes in
an in-memory Lua table (g_RazingTracker), keyed by city-centre plot
coordinates. If you save while a city is mid-raze and reload, the bookkeeping
for that city is gone and its bonus will never pay out. The city still razes
normally.
Fixing this properly means serialising the tracker into a custom database table rather than holding it in memory. It has not been done yet.
Raze completion is detected two ways — GameEvents.CityRazed as the fast path,
with a per-turn PlayerDoTurn poll as a fallback — so the payout itself is
reasonably robust within a single session.
CivVMod-Vandals.modinfo mod manifest, file load order, activation actions
Lua/Vandals_UA.lua auto-raze, bonus calculation, improvement destruction
XML/Text/ all TXT_KEY strings, loaded first so references resolve
XML/Leaders/ Genseric — traits, flavours, diplomacy
XML/Civilizations/ civ definition, city list, unique replacements
XML/Units/ Vandal Marauder
XML/Buildings/ Vandal Camp
Load order matters: text loads before everything else, so that TXT_KEY
references resolve as the other tables populate.
MIT — see LICENSE.
This is an unofficial fan mod. Civilization V is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive and Firaxis Games; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by either, and requires a legitimate copy of the game to run.