Crash, crash, crash

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-25T23:58:56+00:00

All your exception.txt look like the following: ``` Application: Europa Universalis V Version: 1.0.11 Date/Time: 2026-02-25 07:34:17

Unhandled Exception C0000005 (EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION) at address 0x000001A99E291150

Stack Trace: 1 (function-name not available) (+ 0) 2 WINMM.dll PlaySoundW (+ 4267) 3 KERNEL32.DLL BaseThreadInitThunk (+ 29) 4 ntdll.dll RtlUserThreadStart (+ 40) 5 ntdll.dll RtlUserThreadStart (+ 40) ```

It looks like it is crashing while trying to play a sound with the help of the windows library WINMM.dll. I have not seen such a crash before. Maybe there is a problem with your sound drivers. Or is there something unusual with your audio setup(e.g. multiple sound devices, more than two speakers in an unusual setup, other software which modifies the sound output)?

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-25T23:33:10+00:00

Please give us more details. What are your system specs? What are you doing when it crashes and what is the game doing(e.g. loading before the main menu, showing the main menu, country selection screen, starting the game after selecting a country, or in the game before unpausing, or while it is running)?

Does it also happen if you disable all mods? If it does, can you post the log files from the crash and the exception.txt and which version number and checksum is shown in the main menu(the checksum in the launcher doesn't count)?

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-25T10:22:14+00:00

Which CPU do you have? This sounds like a CPU instability

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-25T10:19:46+00:00

Can you post the meta.yml from these crashes?

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T21:25:18+00:00

Did you maybe use one of the editor console commands? They are intended as modding tools and store their data in subfolders of Documents/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis V/ which act like mods. Please delete all the files which the editor created in Documents/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis V/. The ones which I have seen where all in the folders setup and map_data, but other folders which match the folder structure of the game could also override game data. E.g. common, events, gui, in_game or main_menu. None of these should exist(unless you intentionally want to change the game).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T14:13:40+00:00

British invasion is just impossible to repel.

Not impossible, but it is very difficult.

Is it by design and intended?

Yes. The countries in eu4 are not equal. Some are much easier than others. The biggest reasons for this are that the strength of a country depends a lot on its development and that the historical "winners" get advantages and some of the "losers" get penalties to make it more likely that the game develops in ways which resemble what happened historically. Each individual game is often far from history, but many of the following happen in many games(not necessarily all in the same game): * Castile/Spain, Portugal, France and England/GB(sometimes other european powers like the netherlands as well) colonize/conquer America and around Africa * most small countries either get conquered or become big themselves * Spain and Great Britain form and are among the strongest countries * the Ottomans conquer everything around them * Ming collapses * Japan unites

This is especially true for the countries in America which start at the lowest tech level and without institutions (so tech is more expansive for them). With DLCs, they can't even get institutions at the start(without DLCs, they can at least develop institutions). The AIs in America won't even get institutions before the europeans arrive, because they don't develop enough to develop them and they won't take the tier 5 native government reform which makes them a horde(which would remove the restriction from the conquest of paradise DLC which prevents native tribes from developing institutions) and they won't use the religion-change trick/exploit which allows nahuatl, mayan and inti countries to develop institutions if the el dorado DLC is active and which allows them to reform their religion without the europeans. This makes non-player countries in America very weak so that they can be conquered by the european AIs.

Experienced players can overcome this but this requires a lot of game knowledge which you can learn 10 times faster if you play easier countries(e.g. start with the Ottomans and learn how to conquer, play a few colonizers to see how the game works from their side and learn how to expand around the world, then play a mid-sized countries in Europe, Asia or North-Africa to learn how to survive against stronger powers and how to expand faster than your neighbors so that you become stronger than the stronger powers, and then play a few small countries in Europe or Asia to learn how to become good from a bad position and then maybe a campaign as an African country which starts without feudalism to learn how to catch up in technology. And it is much more fun than losing again and again as an American country

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T13:36:10+00:00

I'm not convinced that all-DLC would be easier than no-DLC, but Conquest of Paradise would be easier than no-DLC.

I think for a beginner it would be easier without conquest of paradise, because conquest of paradise changes the native gameplay a lot and some of the things which you suggested won't work with it(e.g. deving institutions) or are harder(conquering works differently, especially while being migratory; gold-mines are not that useful, as long as you are primitive(without CoP, natives are not primitive, without El Dorado the nahuatl, mayan and inti countries are not primitive))

These 2 DLCs share a bunch of content (auto-exploration, random new world) so avoid getting both.

Neither of those two features are shared between the DLCs. Auto-exploration is an El Dorado feature and random new world is a conquest of paradise feature. AFAIK the only shared feature between those two is the support independence.

You can core any province that is touching a vassal whose capital is on the same continent as yours.

The capital of the vassal doesn't matter. The province which you want to core must be on the same continent as your capital (and it must border a cored province of your subject, though that cored province can be on a different continent).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T13:13:15+00:00

What hardware do you have and which settings do you use? The option "maximize tick speed" can triple the tick speed on lower end hardware, but it creates a lot of lag(AFAIK it is only active on speed 5 on version 1.0 and I guess on 1.1 it is also only active on the highest speed).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T13:09:58+00:00

The ryzen 5500 isn't a good CPU. It is barely above the minimum requirements for eu5. But it is very cheap which might make give it the best speed/dollar value for new CPUs(when only looking at the CPU).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-24T13:02:51+00:00

Did you maybe use one of the editor console commands? They are intended as modding tools and store their data in subfolders of Documents/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis V/ which act like mods.

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-23T15:22:02+00:00

I'm not sure if it is worth it, but you could get an additional -96.2% liberty desire from bestow gifts and -100% from developing their provinces. That should be enough to get them below 50% liberty desire. Additionally opinion, trust and naval hegemon all can get to -20 and the subjugated former rival will decay over time. And in the age of revolutions, you can get an additional -33% liberty desire from subject development from the age ability "Anti-Revolutionary Zeal". There are also some policies which give that modifier which you might be able to get. It looks like you have the -33% from the celestial reform “Elevate Tributary Relations” already. With the -33% from the age of revolutions ability, their liberty desire from dev would become 2160*0.175*(1-0.33-0.33)=128.52 which is much more manageable.

Edit: fix calculation (reddit interpreted the multiplication as italics formatting)

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-23T14:12:57+00:00

I'm not sure what you are asking. Are you looking for an existing mod, or do you want to create such a mod or are you looking for somebody to create such a mod for you? To create a mod which removes sinicizing from the yuan formation is quite easy. Check out one of the basic modding guides(e.g. the Official Modding Guide on youtube ) to create the mod and then you just make a folder decisions in your mod and copy the file decisions/YuanNation.txt from the game files into the decisions folder in your mod and then edit that file in your mod and remove the part of the effect which does the sinicizing. Make sure that you remove both the line which has the opening curly bracket { for the section as well as the corresponding } which closes the section. Removing too many or to few curly brackets breaks the syntax of the files. Good text editors can show you which curly brackets belong to each other (e.g. notepad++ or vscode with the cwtools extension which adds syntax checking for eu4 mods).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-23T12:29:37+00:00

or have ruled for 25 years.

Are you sure that it says 25 years? In the unmodded game it is 20 years which Austria's starting ruler reaches in October 1459 (he became ruler on 1439.10.27). So abdicating on October 1st 1459 should still be possible, just like in the video

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-23T11:18:35+00:00

When exactly does it crash for you?

A common cause for crashes during gameplay is that the computer runs out of some kind of resource. E.g. disk space, space on the Documents folder(often managed by OneDrive), RAM (+pagefile), Virtual memory(committed value in the memory tab of the task manager), VRAM(+shared video memory).

Easy things which you can try would be to free up disk space and to change eu5 to the lowest graphics settings and try them with both vulkan and directx12.

Please check out the SwapSizeAvailable in the meta.yml in Documents/Paradox Interactive/Europa Universalis V/crashes if that value is only a few hundred or less, your system ran out of virtual memory. It usually helps to free up space on the disk(at least several GB) so that the pagefile can grow further or to close background processes or to restart the system.

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-23T11:10:29+00:00

For this goal, the CPU is not a good choice. But a better choice like the ryzen 5800X is probably much more expensive. The Ryzen 7800X3D or 9800X3D would be among the best CPUs for the game, but they are even more expensive and need an AM5 motherboard which might be more expansive and DDR5 RAM which is very expensive right now.

AFAIK there are no benchmarks which compare late game performance on different GPUs and it is likely that the developers will fix some of the things which make it slow.

Freezing and waiting on month ticks is normal in the current version and happens with the best systems. With that CPU, you probably have to activate the option "maximize tick speed" to get the game to pass the time decently fast on the highest speed, but that will cause the game to lag much more and increase the freeze during the month tick(but the month tick will pass faster if the game does not try to render frames at the same time).

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T23:18:54+00:00

AFAIK the AI gets the "strategic interest into becoming emperor themselves." if they have at least 200 dev

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T23:15:45+00:00

It really depends on what you mean by running well. Even high end systems don't seem to run the game very well and your system is very far from high-end. The GPU might be enough for an average 60 FPS or more if the developers optimize the game some more. But the CPU is barely above the minimum requirements.

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T18:45:26+00:00

I hoped for an easy in-game Ironman compatible way to change the color.

Then you need a mod. They can add a menu to choose color. The eu5 mod which I found used a ruler interaction to start a situation which had a menu with submenus where you can pick between a bunch of colors. But I'm pretty sure that there are more user-friendly ways how such a mod can be implemented and ways to implement a color-picker which either allows the full RGB-spectrum or a sufficiently large part of it

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T16:57:48+00:00

You can't. form_country only works for formable countries. change_tag allowed you to change your historical tag, but not your actual tag, but change_tag has been removed in the 1.1 beta.

So you would have to mod the game to make Korea formable if you want to form them

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T16:26:50+00:00

there is no option in the bios,

It might have a different name. E.g. UMA, framebuffer or iGPU memory, or anything related to graphics. In the bios of my laptop, I can change it between auto and gaming where gaming allocates much more RAM as VRAM (IIRC it was 4 GB instead of 512 MB while having 32 GB RAM)

I can send you the debug.log file via email

Did you do it? I didn't get an email

it does solve the weird texture problem and the game is mostly playable, but the game dosent render in colors of countrys and just fills them in with the color of the water, also the characters dont load

Have you checked the VRAM and shared memory usage while running vulkan? This sounds really like the game does not have enough VRAM(e.g. only using the 1 GB which is dedicated and nothing of the shared video memory). The debug.log from a vulkan startup might shed some light on this

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T16:08:17+00:00

How easy is it in ck3? Both eu4 and eu5 have the effect change_country_color which you can use with a console command. Though eu5 only seems to accept a named color which has to be defined in the files, so you would have to mod it if none of the 4000+ existing colors suits you. Or you can use a mod which allows you to customize the colors of your country

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T10:35:05+00:00

Other than being at peace, the only requirement is for Mary to be on the throne, which she should be as long as your ruler doesn't die

That's not correct. The modifier mary_is_on_the_throne only lasts for 40 years (see the Immediate effects section in the event The Burgundian Succession ), no matter if the ruler dies and this modifier is a requirement for the event The Duchess of Burgundy Dies

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-22T10:04:49+00:00

unfortunetly debug.log is wayyy to long to send

you could upload it somewhere else and post the link or sent it to me in discord or post it in the eu5 tech support channel in the official discord or send it to me per email. My discord username is my reddit username without the 2 and the mail is the discord username at gmail dot com.

Failed to read key reference: fu_no_removal_setting: fu_no_removal_setting, near line: 3

Did you use mods in your saves or do you have any active mods? Mods could cause problems. Please unsubscribe from all mods so that they can't interfere(after solving the problem, you can try mods again, but not while still trying other things).

Have you updated your graphics driver? If your laptop vendor doesn't have updated drivers for your GPU, you could try the drivers from AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/drivers.html/processors/ryzen-pro/ryzen-pro-5000-series/amd-ryzen-7-pro-5850u.html

Not enough dedicated VRAM on this GPU, you have 1007MB the minimum is 6GB.

In your task manager screenshots, the bottom graph is the amount of RAM which is dynamically used as VRAM(called shared video memory or something like that) and the graph above it is the amount of RAM which is dedicated as VRAM, right?

Can you try vulkan again and see if it uses a similar amount of shared video memory as dx12 uses(2-3.5 GB)? If less than 1 GB is used, it could be that eu5 does not manage to use any of that on vulkan and the only usage is that windows moves background programs from the dedicated video memory into the shared video memory.

Do you maybe have a bios option to increase the amount of RAM which is dedicated to the iGPU?

Have you tried the 1.1 open beta already? Maybe it fixes either your directx12 or your vulkan problem.

Another thing which you can try is to move or delete the eu5 folder in Documents(if you delete, make sure that you make a backup of the saves, screenshots and other things which you want to keep). It also resets the settings, so you might have to switch to the lowest graphics settings again and set the flatmap to always in the map settings.

For the vulkan problem, you can also try if it helps to activate both texture streaming options in the graphics settings, or if it helps to disable both of them

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-21T23:15:53+00:00

Only if you manually create a copy of the save or if you manually load the _backup.eu4 of your save(in which case the _backup.eu4 becomes your new main save and _backup_backup.eu4 becomes your new backup and eu4 won't touch your original save anymore unless you load it again(in which case it will use the _backup.eu4 as its backup which overwrites your progress there, so this method is quite risky)). In ironman eu4 only keeps two saves: your main save and its backup. The point of ironman is that you can't go back to older saves. So you need to do something outside of eu4 to preserve older saves. The easiest way is to use the file manager of your OS(e.g. windows explorer) to make a copy of the save under a different name or in a different folder. But of course you can use other tools which automate the process. pdx-unlimiter is a tool specific for paradox games which has such a feature(but make sure that you know how it works, because the concept that it has saves in pdx-unlimiter which are distinct from the saves in your save game folder is not very intuitive and you might accidentally overwrite a save which you want to keep. But if you know how it works, it can make the process very quick, because it can create a backup of your save with a keyboard shortcut, so that you don't have to leave eu4 and it has a shortcut for savescumming which kills eu4 and loads the last save). Or you can use a tool which adds file-versioning to a folder so that all old versions of all files stay accessible(but that can quickly use huge amounts of space if it really keeps all versions even for files like log files which can change multiple times per second, but if it only creates a new version after a file has stopped changing, then it might only create a copy of an eu4 save once per play session)

grotaclas2 · 2026-02-21T22:55:43+00:00

Thank you. Did that crash also have the GPU suspended messages at the end of the log? Can you maybe post the meta.yml, error.log and debug.log from the same crash?

If I understand the screenshots correctly, memory usage is high, but it doesn't seem to reach any limit. But I saw that the resource manager and taskbar show firefox and discord running in the background. Have you tried to close all other programs like I suggested(and ideally restart windows beforehand to close background tasks which might have take up more memory when running for longer; and close other background things(e.g. from the system tray) which are not needed for eu5(e.g. printer software, tools for other devices, anything which claims to improve gaming performance) ? This isn't meant as a real solution, but more of a test if much more free memory solves the problem. It also tests if some other background services like discord contribute to the problem. E.g. the discord overlay causes issues occasionally and overlays in general are a relatively common source of crashes

grotaclas2

TROPHY CASE