EU4 and other paradox games crashing on startup

[Akamira]

EU4, along with other paradox games like HoI4 no longer start after my PC crashed abruptly while I was playing EU4. The game crashes while starting (after I click Play on the v2 launcher)

I followed all the steps in another thread on the paradox forums which I can't link here but none of those seemed to help.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

 

[Akamira]

Could anyone please point me in the right direction? I've searched anything I could find but so far nothing helps me solve the issue, the game keeps crashing as soon as I launch it both through the x2 launcher and the eu .exe file directly.

 

[AndrewT]

Is it that the launcher runs okay but does not start the games? Or it does not start?

What happens if you run eu4.exe and hoi4.exe from file explorer directly?

 

[Akamira]

It used to be that the launcher would open normally and once I clicked the Play button the game would attemp to open and would show the EU4 logo as normal, but then the game would close itself and no error message would pop up. Same with HoI4.

Before I did the clean re-install as directed by you in another thread (uninstall and delete everything EU4 before reinstalling and verifying files after) the game used to crash at the "loading graphics" screen, right before I would see EU4's global map.

When I tried to open them directly through the .exe files they would still crash at the same places, but for some reason this morning both games open normally if I try to open them through the .exe files although none of the DLCs are available this way but when I try to open them through the launcher eu4 gives me the error: "Launching the game failed."

I didn't change anything, I don't know why they're behaving differently this morning. Didn't even restart the computer.

 

[AndrewT]

Ah, that is usually an antivirus app getting in the way. What antivirus app do you use? You need to make sure all these apps are in its exceptions lists:

eu4.exe and dowser.exe (in the Steam EU4 folder)
C:/users/<UserName>/AppData/Local/Programs/Paradox Interactive/launcher-v2.2022.8/paradox launcher.exe
C:/users/<UserName>/AppData/Local/Programs/Paradox Interactive/bootstrapper-v2.exe

IF that doesn't help, also set each of those .exe files (EXCEPT eu4.exe !) to run as the Windows Admin user.

Then the game should run from Steam/our launcher, and enable all the DLCs.

 

[Akamira]

Thank you! I'm using AVAST. Adding the exceptions on avast didn't help but checking all those to run as admin and UNchecking eu4.exe to run as admin did the trick and the game is launching as normal now.

 

[Arfas123]

Thank you! I'm using AVAST. Adding the exceptions on avast didn't help but checking all those to run as admin and UNchecking eu4.exe to run as admin did the trick and the game is launching as normal now.

Could you explain how you did that?