EU4 Crash on MacBook

[vivalafrance10]

For a while now, I've had an issue where EU4 will randomly freeze with the spinning rainbow circle. It's so bad that I have to force re-start my MacBook to even exit the game. I'm running macOS Tahoe Version 26.0.1, but I've had this issue well before that. Would anyone have any advice on how to fix it? Thank you in advance!

[tonypa]

I feel like the problem is that EU4 was released in 2013, your OS in 2025. It is unlikely Paradox can keep up with all the changes Apple has made in last 12 years.

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by vivalafrance10:

For a while now, I've had an issue where EU4 will randomly freeze with the spinning rainbow circle.

It is probably one of the common eu4 crashes on macOS. What does the exception.txt say?

Originally posted by vivalafrance10:

It's so bad that I have to force re-start my MacBook to even exit the game.

That should not happen. Have you tried all the ways which macOS offers to abort or switch out of applications which are freezing and don't exit when they get termination signals(e.g. on windows alt+f4 can be caught by an application and it can continue running, but killing in the task manager can't be prevent) or which prevent the normal ways to switch to a different application? The following support article describes one way: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102586

Originally posted by tonypa:

I feel like the problem is that EU4 was released in 2013, your OS in 2025. It is unlikely Paradox can keep up with all the changes Apple has made in last 12 years.

I don't think that keeping up with macOS is the problem. There are a bunch of crashing bugs in the current eu4 version(most of them were reported before version 1.37.4 came out, but were never fixed). All the ones which I have investigated happen under both macOS and linux, so they are not caused by a macOS problem. Sooner or later every macOS and linux player of the game is affected. But the most common crash(CDependency::Transfer) happens way more often on some macOS systems than on Linux and it happens way more often on Linux than on windows. Another relatively common crash (CPeaceOffer::Execute_UpdateAggressiveExpansion) is equally likely on windows, macOS and Linux, but it only affects players who have neither the leviathan nor cossacks DLC. They are all segmentation faults[en.wikipedia.org] where eu4 tries to access a part of the memory which it is not allowed to access. They are programming errors in eu4. I think it is more or less random that the memory on windows is allocated in a way which makes the crashes less likely or not happen at all. I'm pretty sure that there were as many windows crashes of these types over the lifetime of eu4 as there were macOS or linux specific ones. But the windows crashes were much more likely to get caught during development, so the public didn't see many of them. And common windows crashes were fixed with a high priority and not left unfixed over months or years.

[tonypa]

I have no actual intention to pick fight with anyone, but your reply, while really well written, just shows why PDX does not support Mac or Linux with EU5 anymore. They still need to bugtest the game with every possible DLC combination on every different system, and if 95% of players use Windows, it simply does not make sense to support 3 different OS. You can not deny that MacOS itself has changed over last 10 years too, so programs that worked in 2013 could break in 2025.

Again, not trying to defend PDX, just pointing out why they possibly do not care.

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by tonypa:

I have no actual intention to pick fight with anyone, but your reply, while really well written, just shows why PDX does not support Mac or Linux with EU5 anymore.

Really? In what way? I thought I was showing the opposite. The CDependency::Transfer crash was first reported for macOS. If the developers would have fixed it at that point, it would not have ruined the campaigns of the windows players who are also affected by it. And there is a chance that the change_tag crash which does not happen on windows, is causing some other issue there. Eu4 accesses the wrong memory address and it is very likely that it also does that on windows, but that address happens to belong to eu4 on windows(sometimes also on macOS or linux, because the crash is not always reproducible). Whatever eu4 does with that memory probably has some consequences on windows as well. It could be responsible for some of the weird bugs people post from time to time which nobody else has ever experienced.

Originally posted by tonypa:

They still need to bugtest the game with every possible DLC combination on every different system

I can assure you that they do not do this. There are 19 game-changing DLCs(excluding the 3 which have been integrated into the base game), so there are 2^19=524288 possible ways how you can combine them. They can't possibly test that many combinations. I don't know any crash or bug which did not happen with all DLCs which did not happen on all OS. The CPeaceOffer::Execute_UpdateAggressiveExpansion seems to happen equally on windows, linux and macOS(almost all reports for it are for windows, but I was able to reproduce the crash on linux with all the saves which I tested). And there is a bug that the native federation window does not open if you play with Conquest of Paradise, but with neither El Dorado nor Winds of Change. And it also happens on all OS.

Originally posted by tonypa:

and if 95% of players use Windows, it simply does not make sense to support 3 different OS. You can not deny that MacOS itself has changed over last 10 years too, so programs that worked in 2013 could break in 2025.

I would say that the question is how many additional sales supporting another OS generates compared to its costs. Most linux users can probably run the game with proton so that generates few sales. But on macOS it is not that easy and the good tools to run windows games on macOS costs money(e.g. crossover).

The question is how many tests are done on each OS. I think macOS and linux was tested relatively little, so it didn't cost that much. And the development cost for a macOS or linux version for eu5 is almost 0, because all the OS-specific stuff should be in the clausewitz engine and jomini layer which are shared with ck3 and vic3, both of which support linux and macOS. eu4 didn't directly share the code so it didn't have that advantage. And it still had an opengl version which was not used on windows and which still has years-old graphical bugs which were never fixed(and one of the macOS/linux crashes is related to opengl). eu5 supports both vulkan and directx version, even on windows, so there is additional cost for the graphics on linux or macOS which both support vulkan. The cost for fixing the occasional os-specific crashes is not that high if they are handled quickly. An experienced developer who knows the codebase can probably fix such a crash in one or two hours if there is a save where the crash can be reproduced reliably. And then QA could spend similar amounts of time to retest several of the crashing saves to see if there are fixed.

There is additional cost from tech support, mostly from non-game-related things which prevent the game from working properly which are pretty OS specific(e.g. the ransomware protection component in macOS can prevent the game from writing to the documents folder(windows defender can do that as well), desktop scaling on some linux UIs can make the game misdetect the resolution and then it renders only in part of the screen). This kind of depends how knowledgeable the tech support person is in that regard. AndrewT who does tech support for eu4 on the forum is a macOS user who can usually give good and quick support for the macOS issues. During the last year, he probably spend much more time handling the support requests from people who had crashes and this could have been avoided if the crashes would have been fixed quickly.

[tonypa]

It looks like we live in totally different worlds :)

In my experience development cost for additional OS is never 0, even when it first looks like it.