Game crashes on start up now.

[St Jon]

After having had no problems at all with CivV everything seems to have gone badly amiss.

Steam updated itself and then downloaded the latest patch, I assume the one for Spanish XP users, so I restarted Steam and attempted to play. Game crashed out during the 1st 30 secs of the opening video. I thought I could resolve this by a restart of the system - still no joy - so I tried in offline mode. Steam asked the bizarre question as to whether I was using DirectX9? This is odd as I run under XP and that's all I've ever had. Still no joy! Last forlorn effort was then to disable the video but I was unsurprised that this to failed.

Has anyone else encountered such a problem? Is there a way of getting Steam to ask you first if you want a patch? Sorry if this seems selfish but whether or not Spanish versions of XP crash is not the concern of someone living in England and I could live without such an enhancement.

Apart from re-installing the entire thing can anyone offer any suggestions?

[notyoueither]

I think I saw an option somewhere to disable auto updates.

I do not know how you will rid yourself of the patch that caused the problem without removing and reinstalling, or how you will be able to get patches without the bad one.

[St Jon]

Thanks. A reinstall did work but how you disable updates and patches I don't know.

I shall be very disenchanted if this happens with each new patch and there must be many of them to come.

[SandMonkey]

Thanks. A reinstall did work but how you disable updates and patches I don't know.

In your Steam library game list, right click on Civ 5. Select Properties, and then select the Updates tab. There should be a dropdown where you can select Do Not Automatically Update. Of course if you do this you won't get the new patch that appears to be imminent.