How To Fix Sid Meier's Civilization VI Errors, Not Starting, Crashes, Optimization for Performance Issues - Games Errors (2023)

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is now available on Steam, and by now the game has pretty good reviews, the average is Positive and players are enjoying the game.The next entry in the Civilization franchise is published by 2K Games and is currently available only for Windows but with planned ports for OS X and Linux.

The new installment of the franchise also has some errors and glitches that players are currently complaining about on the Steam Dashboard of the game and on the 2K forums. Apparently, the most encounteredSid Meier’s Civilization VI errorsare Game Not Starting, the game simply won’t start for some players or they encounter a crash or error code at the startup, Crashes, especially random crashes throughout the game and Performance Issues that are making the game unplayable.

Civilization VI offers new ways to interact with your world, expand your empire across the map, advance your culture, and compete against history’s greatest leaders to build a civilization that will stand the test of time. Play as one of 20 historical leaders including Roosevelt (America) and Victoria (England).

Now let’s go ahead and fix your game. First, you need to check and make sure that you meet the minimum system requirements of the game, you can find them below too. If your PC doesn’t meet the requirements, you need to upgrade it because this is why you are encountering errors. If you are above the minimum req go to the second step of fixing your issues, you will find it after the system requirements!

Minimum:

OS: Windows 7 64bit / 8.1 64bit / 10 64bit
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i3 2.5 GHz or AMD Phenom II 2.6 GHz or greater
MEMORY: 4 GB RAM
HARD DRIVE: 12 GB or more
DVD-ROM: Required for disc-based installation
VIDEO CARD: 1 GB DirectX 11 Video Card (AMD 5570 or nVidia 450)

Recommended:

OS: Windows 7 64bit / 8.1 64bit / 10 64bit
PROCESSOR: Fourth generation Intel Core i5 2.5 GHz or AMD FX8350 4.0 Ghz or greater
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
HARD DRIVE: 12 GB or more
DVD-ROM: Required for disc-based installation
VIDEO CARD: 2 GB DirectX 11 Video Card (AMD 7970 or nVidia 770 or greater)

Other Requirements:

Initial installation requires one-time Internet connection for Steam authentication; software installations required (included with the game) include Steam Client, Microsoft Visual C++ 2012 and 2015 Runtime Libraries, and Microsoft DirectX.

Second, if you have Windows 8.1 x64, you need to checkand see if you have the latest Windows XB updates. For a guide on how to do that, check the steps below. After you check the Windows update, you can go ahead and fix your errors. Below you will find a list with all the game bugs, and for each issue, you will find a corresponding solution or workaround. Check the list below for more details!

Attention Windows 8.1 x64 Users:

During development and testing, it’s come to our attention that there are some very important Windows KB updates for this version of the Operating System. Instead of including the 800MB for all users, we instead wrote this supplemental information Article.

How to check if you have the KB installed

If you keep up-to-date with your Windows Updates, you should be all set! But, in case you haven’t, you can check if this is installed when you go to “Add Remove Programs” in Windows 8.1. Along the left side, there’s a feature to view your “Installed Windows Updates.” This list is pretty long, but if you are able to see KB2919355 (800 megs) and KB2919442 (about 10 megs), then you’re ready to go!

Where do I download these?

If you don’t have these, here are the Microsoft links for the two System Updates we are referring to.

https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=42162

NOTE: Even though the KB number is newer, this one should be installed first
https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=42335

NOTE: This will download about 4 files, and there is a specific order in which these need to be installed.

Let’s start now and fix your errors! Below is a list of the most common issues that players are currently complaining about. For each issue, you will find a corresponding solution or workaround to fix it. If you don’t know how to use a solution or apply a workaround you can contact our Support Team here and a member will help you fix your game in just a few minutes because we offer support 24/7.

#1 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Not Starting

This error looks like this, if you have it too read below to know how to fix it.

When I try to launch Civ 6 the message “Preparing to launch Civilization VI” appears, and then the message flashes away and appears again. The game won’t launch and I’ve been watching the same message for 2 hours, please help!

This is the most encountered error of the game. Some players are unable to start it because when they click the Play button in the Steam Library nothing happens or they receive a crash back to thedesktop and some random error code. For example, a player reported this: “Steam says that the game launched (Little box goes green) nothing happens, after about 10 seconds little box goes blue.”To fix this issue and start your game follow the solution below.

Solution: The best way to fix this issue and start your game is to apply our patch, it will fix the launch bug and optimize your game. After that, you will be able to start and play the game with no problems. Go ahead and check the tutorial at the end of the post to see how to use this patch! (Go Now)

A user on Reddit posted this workaround too, you can try it and see if it fixes your game:

Ok, so I had the same issue with Shadow Warrior the other day and it turned out to be Alienware LightFX causing issues (I don’t have any of their devices). I did some digging around in the dmp file that Civ was generating and using random guesswork, came to the following solution.

I renamed the following files to something like xxx.dll.OLD

• C:\Windows\System32\LightFX.dll
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\LightFX.dll
• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\LightFXXPS.dll

The game launched fine after that.

Can’t hurt to give it a try right? Hope it works for you

#2 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Sound Bug

It seems that for some players the sound in the game is bugged. It’s either a weird crackling noise, the intro is completely desynched or the soundspeed is not normal and is high pitched. For example, this is what a user on Steam said about this sound issue: “Mine is crackling too but is also spoken faster than it should. I watched the intro and the audiotape was over in the halfway of the video.”

Workaround:A workaround for the sound issue is to downgrade your sound quality to 16 bits. To do that just go to the setting in the main menu of the game and after that to the sound tab.

#3 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI No Compatible Graphics Device Found

This issue is generated by your GPU because it’s outdated. By default, Civilization 6 uses DirectX 12 and your graphic card can’t support this version so it tries to run the game on Dx 11 and you get this error about “No compatible graphics device found”.

The easiest and most expensive solution to fix this issue is to update your PC and buy a new graphic processing unit. But because I think that most of you don’t want to do that, follow the workarounds below and maybe you will get past this error and play the game.

Workarounds:

There are 2 ways to play the game with your GPU and using DirectX11 but both of them result in horrible performance issues and low fps. Don’t worry about that because we will fix the framerate issue later. First, we need to make sure that we can run the game on DirectX11 and do to that you need to apply the stepts below to your game.

• First Method:

Press Windows+R again and run dxcpl (If this can’t be found, install the Windows SDK which can be found here for Windows 7 and here for Windows 8. Windows 10 should not require anything and you should find the application.)

Click on Edit List and add “SteamApps\common\Sid Meier’s Civilization VI\Base\Binaries\Win64Steam\CivilizationVI.exe” to the list. Next check the checkbox at the bottom that says Force WARP. Click apply and close this window. Finally, open “Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization VI\AppOptions.txt” and change AllowSWRenderer to 1 and FullScreen to 2.
This should result in the game at least running, but like I said performance will be horrible and you need a pretty strong CPU to make this even playable, which is unlikely if you already had a bad GPU in the first place. Red below to fix the framerates after you applied this workaround.

• Second Method:

Navigate to “Sid Meier’s Civilization VI\Base\Binaries\Win64Steam”. There will be two executable’s, one titled “Civilization VI”, one titled “CivilizationVI_DX12”. Use “Civilization VI” to launch the game, which will utilize Directx 11, and your problems should be solved. By default, Civilization VI appears to use the DirectX 12 executable.

After applying the workarounds above you should have fixed yourCivilization VI no compatible graphics device found error and your game should run fine but with some framerate issues. To fix this too and enjoy the game at fullest read the green box below.

Read here to fix the FPS!After you applied these workarounds and managed to run the game on DirectX 11 you might experience horrible performance issues and very low framerate like below 10. To fix that you need to optimize your GPU and the game. We have a detailed tutorial on how to do that at the end of the post. Go there for more details!

#4 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Crashes

You might encounter from time to time random crashes during the gameplay of the game or you might encounter a crash at the startup of the game. The random crashes are so annoying because you are unable to save the game and you receive them so often. Because of that, you lose progress and you can’t build your empire. Other types of crashes reported by players are crashes during the tutorial and crashes when changing to democracy and policies.To fix this issue try to apply the solution below.

Solution:The first step is to check and see if your GPU is up to date, to do this fast and easy you can use our patch it will also install the corresponding update for your graphic card. If you still encounter crashes after that, apply our patch by selecting the Crashes issue in the right box! Go to the end of the post for more details! (Go Now)

#5 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Map Scroll At Edges

There is an issue where the map scroll does not work in most of the diagonal and does not work up because of the top menubar and because of that you need to use the arrow keys or you need to click both mouse buttons that is annoying and leads to unwanted unit movements.

Workarounds:

• Add moving map with WASD.
• Clicking with the middle mouse button (or clicking with the wheel) will move the map to center on your mouse pointer.
• The edge scroll work, the “edge” is just before the UI elements because those disable scrolling. So for the top, you simply hold the cursor just below the menu bar and it will continue scrolling. Edge scrolling diagonally does indeed not work though, the UI seems too large in those sections to work similarly to the top so I don’t know what to do about that aside from disabling the UI preventing scrolling.
• As for WASD vs Arrows. Outside of games where you control a character (strategy games basically) those keys are almost always dedicated to some menu operation. In this game, W opens the great works window for example. An option to change it to what ever you want would be nice I guess since more options is always better but I don’t know why people have such trouble with it. It certainly isn’t something to get pissy about at least.

#6 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Performance Issues

You might be unable to play the game because of performance issues like Low FPS, FPS Drops or Stuttering. These issues are because of the poor optimization of the game or it might be your PC. To fix them you need to optimize your Windows by applying the workarounds below.

Workarounds:

• For AMD users, disable Raptr from task manager. Disable any other intensive applications that may be running in thebackground. Also, try setting ‘Tessellation mode’ to 8x/16x and ‘Texture Filtering Quality’ to Performance from your latest Crimson edition Radeon software to fix frame rate drops.
• For Nvidia users, go into your control panel 3d settings. Make sure that ‘Power Management Mode’ option should be set to ‘Prefer Maximum Performance’.
• If you are experiencing screen flickering or frame-pacing issues, disable Crossfire/SLI and run the game using a single GPU. Also, disable Steam Overlay by right clicking the game in Steam Library and then go to Game Properties.
• The last solution and the best one is to apply the patch below, it will optimize your game and you will have constant frames with no stutter. Go below for more details!

Let’s hope that by now you managed to fix all yourSid Meier’s Civilization VIerrorsand issues and that you are enjoying the game. If you still encounter some issues, and you are unable to fix them, or you don’t know how to apply our patch, please comment below or open aSupport ticket on our support page. After that, a member of our team will help you as soon as possible to fix your error so you can enjoy your game.–GamesErrors Team