Paradox Launcher not starting when running Stellaris specifically, other Paradox games work

[Iadria]

Hey folks, I had a really weird bug today. I figured out how to fix it, but I wanted to share this because it is kinda surprising to me.

On a brand new and freshly set-up Windows 11 laptop, I installed Steam and then downloaded Stellaris. Then I tried to run Stellaris, and nothing happened.

I followed instructions on here about uninstalling the launcher and re-installing it directly via the downloaded msi. Nothing.

I looked at the log files for the game; almost nothing.

I could never even get the paradox launcher to appear, and I never saw any errors or anything, I would just push the Play button in Steam and nothing would happen. If I opened task manager, there would be 3 Paradox Launcher tasks in there, which I had to force stop.

As long as I remembered to force stop the dead Paradox Launcher task, Age of Wonder would actually launch successfully, though, which was interesting. Clearly not a problem with the launcher itself, since it literally worked for a different Paradox game in Steam.

Eventually I tried launching Stellaris directly from the steamapps directory. When I did that I got errors indicating that I did not have a Visual C++ Redistributable installed. Specifically it was complaining about “VCRUNTIME140.dll is missing” and "VCOMP110.dll was not found", etc.

That's fair, it's a brand new laptop, and nothing had prompted me to install those yet. And it's a *really* easy fix, so I just went to the Microsoft site and downloaded those. Stellaris launches fine now, both from Stellaris.exe in the Steam directory, and through the Paradox launcher in the Steam client. Everything is fixed.

But why weren't there any errors at all when I tried to launch it through Steam? Why weren't there any logs? And honestly, why wasn't the visual c++ stuff included with the installation, or flagged as a dependency in Steam so that it could download them? I don't set up a ton of new computers but as I recall, games typically prompt you to install this if it's missing. Having it not do that AND having the launcher swallow all the errors from it made it really hard to discover what was going on here.

If nothing else, it might be good to add this to the "The Paradox Launcher v2 doesn't work" article -- installing the redistributables while I was going through the other stuff would have saved me a ton of time.

I've attached the logs I did generate; anything on or after 21:40 is the successful launch, anything before that is a failed one. I hope this helps someone.

 

[AndrewT]

But why weren't there any errors at all when I tried to launch it through Steam?

Steam does seem to hide errors at that point, it is true. One of my first steps with such issues is to run stellaris.exe directly, to show those errors.

Specifically it was complaining about “VCRUNTIME140.dll is missing” and "VCOMP110.dll was not found", etc.

That's fair, it's a brand new laptop, and nothing had prompted me to install those yet. And it's a *really* easy fix, so I just went to the Microsoft site and downloaded those. Stellaris launches fine now, both from Stellaris.exe in the Steam directory, and through the Paradox launcher in the Steam client. Everything is fixed.

Frankly it is surprising that new Windows installation did not come with those! They are by no means new files. Did you apply all available Windows updates after the install?

Why weren't there any logs?

As stellaris.exe could not even start, it could not create any logs.

 

[Iadria]

Frankly it is surprising that new Windows installation did not come with those! They are by no means new files. Did you apply all available Windows updates after the install?

My understanding is that developers are expected to check for the correct runtime / redistributable, and install it separately if it's not present. I think that Microsoft doesn't want to include older potentially vulnerable runtime versions burned on to their installation discs and just hope that users are updating them?

In Steam, my understanding is that installing the redistributables is usually handled by the Steam Common Redistributables system. I would expect Steam to install these for me as needed, which is typically how other games do it. Having to go and do it myself isn't a huge problem once I figured out that was the actual issue, but it's not how that typically works.

As stellaris.exe could not even start, it could not create any logs.

Oh yeah I get that, but the launcher didn't create any logs of the exception either. I did get other logs from the launcher (they're on my post), and while they're pretty short, they do indicate that the launcher task lived long enough to generate some output. It would be nice if those contained some information about exceptions from the game client, since the launcher is (I assumed) running the exe and presumably hanging due to these failures.


And yeah I probably should have just launched the exe directly, but I actually did want to use the launcher for mod management stuff; I think the Paradox launcher is really helpful for that and I've only had good experiences with it so far,, so this really caught me by surprise.

 

[AndrewT]

Launcher logs have never logged game app errors, they are solely concerned with the launcher's own functionality. If a Windows error (eg 0xc0000007) is generated it shows that, in decimal. But I guess when Steam hid that error from you it also hid it from our launcher.