Game played fine first time, but now freezes at the intro to game screen.

[Neonanocyborgasm]

I bought the game on Steam on 10/21, played it as soon as it finished installing. I played through the tutorial and pretty far in an independent game. It played just fine. Today, I started the game and all it does is freeze at the screen where your civilization is introduced, at the beginning of a game. It keeps saying "Loading, Please Wait" forever. I thought it was because I put the settings on a bigger map with Epic game time, but when I restarted the game and changed them back to the standard game settings, no change occurred. Don't know if it matters, but I selected Russia as the civilization to play, and I played as Rome the first time. I tried verifying the game cache and it claims it's fine. I don't know what to do. There's nothing on Firaxis' website about this problem. So I uninstalled it and am reinstalling it, this time on my C: partition, where I have SSD. Maybe the speed of SSD will make up for it. Or maybe it just got corrupted. I have no clue.

 

[Cel]

There are posts about this elsewhere (can't remember where but I Googled this as the same thing was happening to both PCs in this house), but the issue seems to be with Windows Defender and/or Microsoft Security Essentials. If you add an exclusion for CivilizationVI.exe, it resolves the problem.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

There are posts about this elsewhere (can't remember where but I Googled this as the same thing was happening to both PCs in this house), but the issue seems to be with Windows Defender and/or Microsoft Security Essentials. If you add an exclusion for CivilizationVI.exe, it resolves the problem.

Thanks. I just noticed this myself. I wish I hadn't gone full ****** and reinstalled the game. Oh well. Maybe it will still run super-fast now that I am using the SSD partition.

 

[Kougar7]

Thank you!!

I literally just updated Windows and immediately after rebooting the game began doing this. It would lock briefly during launch, then again when loading from saves. Gave up hunting for the exe so I just had Defender exclude the folder.

 

[kaspergm]

Please, can someone explain how to add an exception to Defender? This happens to me now also. I tried to search for a guide how to do it online, but it was most unhelpful. When I scan the folder in Defender, it says no problems, but I can't see how to add an exception.

Oh, found it, now it works. What I did was:

Seach for windows defender > Open program > Pick "settings" (with the corkwheel in upper right part) > *this opens a new window* > Scroll halfway down > There's a part with "exceptions" - the text "add exception" is clickable - click it > Select the option to exclude a folder > Find Civ VI folder and exclude it (it's probably located in *harddrive letter*:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common