Civ 5 freezes upon loading custom hotseat game

I wanted to a 1v1 Hotseat game with Egypt vs France as a Wonder Race.
I set it up:
Small (duel is too small for my taste)
continents (for each to start on it's own continent)
ancient era
quick pace
legendary start resources
no city states
no barbarians
no ancient ruins
both Civs on Settler difficulty.

Then when press start, it goes to the loading and stays there for a long time, never seeming to load. After a couple of minutes I press control-alt-delete to bring up task manager and I get a message that Civ 5 has stopped working and has to close. There is no details screen, and I can't seem to figure out what went wrong.

Since the first time it happened, I've gone back into the game and tried it several more times, and yet the same exact thing happens, and it is very frustrating to me.

Now, a previous game had worked, but it had 6 city states instead of none. The reason why I turned off city states is because the city states were grabbing valuable resources that I wanted for my Civs, and in a wonder race there is no time to build military units. (which is why I have no barbarians selected.)

Is this setup request just to hard for Civ 5 to comprehend or what? I have no idea what's going on and it is driving me crazy.

To confirm, you are able to play other games, just not this particular matchup and game configuration (e.g. map size, civs, 1v1, etc.)? Also, do you have any mods enabled?