Civ 5 doesn't start anymore

[ottobismarck]

A while after removing the launcher it did still work.
This afternoon it crashed (like many times before...), and I thought just restarting could work. That didn't do so. I was quite confused and uninstalled and reinstalled Civ 5.
Now the message inside the Steam client is "The executable is now being updated." Then it stops - and I could continue until the PC finds its end.

Who can help me?
Thank you very much

 

[Zadera]

Likewise. It is quite disturbing that Steam just gave up on this game after Civ 6 came out. There is no longer any support and it is a far better game IMHO

 

[sorbus]

CIV5 ran everyday here for months up to yesterday.
Today it dies while launching after (unnecessary) "updating executable".
New DX, reinstall, reboot all have no effect.
They must know what they did yesterday that broke it. How do we get them to fix it?

 

[Pawlak]

yeah it won't start for me too, I played last time around Spring 2024, so there was a long time between, but I see I am not the only one for whom it doesn't work. I had this issue with all games a while ago but it was solved when I updated drivers.

 

[theadder]

Try running the verification of local files in Steam if you haven’t already.

 

[speedhakke]

On 21.01.2025 the game was still working fine for me. Yesterday 22.01.2025 however I was able to launch the game for it to crash without error message when trying to load my saved game. After that I was not able to even start it anymore.

I also tried verifying the integrity of the game files, reinstalling the game several times (with reboots, deleting "%userprofile%\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\" and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\"), installing DX9 side-by-side from here and starting with DX9 (with and without "-DX9" launch option), starting with DX10/11 (with and without "-DX12" launch option), starting through Steam and directly executing the games exe files, enabling Windows 7 compability mode on the games exe files, enabling legacy mode as suggested here and all of these options.

So far no success.

 

[speedhakke]

GUYs Doggo found the fix!

See his post here:

D

Post in thread 'Civ5 will not run on Windows 11 after updating to version 24H2'

Dec 27, 2024

I've been struggling with this problem for a few weeks at this point. I was enjoying Civ 5 until I had to upgrade to Windows 11 to fix some corrupted windows permissions as it was easier than fresh installing a new version of Windows 10. After I upgraded to 11, I started to have the infinite "Updating executable" bug occur with Civ 5. Nothing would work, no admin privileges, no turning off read-only, no validating files, no using legacy mode or any other version of DirectX. After a while of fiddling around with these solutions that got me nowhere, what ended up working was an awfully...

• Doggo

• 

His solution worked for me. I only have to re-install the enhanced user interface and then I'm golden again.