How does EU3 work with Windows 11?

[Antonin]

I have the EU3 Complete CD. I played the game a lot on my old PC, but last week I bought a Windows 11 PC. EU3 won't launch on the new computer.

Some kind souls on Reddit said EU3 is available on Steam, so here I am.

Is anyone having trouble running it on Win 11? I just want to play this fine game, without having to do a lot of configuring.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[KtX2SkD]

Neither me nor my two friends run it on Windows 11, so sadly can't update you on that front.

You said you have "Complete", so probably you have the base game plus only two expansions (NA and IN), right? When whoever suggested Steam, did they (knowingly or not) say so because the Steam version is different? Or because expansions 3 and 4 (HTTT and DW) would constitute the solution? If it's the latter, any chance you can save money by buying the two expansions outside of Steam?

Have you also tried running Steam as administrator, or running the game from the EXEs directly instead of through Steam?

Have you tried asking or searching on paradox forums?[forum.paradoxplaza.com] Sadly they don't show all sub-forums until you login with an account and register your serial into it, but, hopefully it'll be of use.

Originally posted by Antonin:

[...] I just want to play this fine game, without having to do a lot of configuring.

I hear you, and I wish we never had to jump through hoops... Had difficulties myself (and others but far less than me) on two fronts when it comes to (I think) post-Windows 7:

• Text and number resolution is a bit crappy, but manageable, maybe due to available fonts? IDK.
  
• Random crashing by this one error[cdn.discordapp.com], seems exclusively triggered by the F1 menu (if it matters), sometimes once in a few IRL months, sometimes several in one IRL day. When it's frequent it kills my interest in the game for days to months... planning to tackle it one day though. Official forum told me C++ 2005 needs to be installed, but I think Windows 10 is misbehaving with the installer, either blocking it or falsely reporting installed. Microsoft itself I think states that it's obsolete, deprecated, or not compatible anyways. Should I just skip all that & virtualize an old Windows version or another OS altogether? Maybe, IDK yet.

Hope any of this helps, and if you do run into useful info, please don't forget to share.

- KitCat.

[Bone Man 2]

Should get it working

"DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010)"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109

"Visual C++ Redistributable Runtimes All-in-One"
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/visual-c-redistributable-runtime-package-all-in-one/