How did Firaxis manage to break Civ V so badly that it crashes and freezes randomly (and repeatedly) while trying to play, and after playing for a few hours in separate sessions, it now won't even go past the initial loading screen anymore (after the logos and initial intro video) in DX 10/11 mode, even after validating the game's cache?
... That's odd... It seems to be able to start up as long as I put the focus on another window as soon as I start Civ V (e.g. click another window on another monitor, since it is borderless fullscreen windowedness). At least, it successfully reached the main menu twice by doing that, and I was able to load a saved game just now*, and every other time I've tried starting it and kept the focus on Civ V it only reached ~160 MB of memory usage and then CPU usage by Civ V dropped to 0% and it just sat there forever, doing nothing, until terminated.
* After loading that saved game, and clicking over to this window and then back to Civ V (without having clicked the button which you get for getting into the game once it finishes loading), both monitors went black and when they came back a couple seconds later, Civ V was gone. I can only presume it fled into the night.
This is madness!
Edit: Rebooting solved the 'does not get past initial loading' issue (apparently windows downloaded some updates and wanted to install them, but didn't bother to tell me), but not the crashing, but I discovered that it was using too much video memory, and by turning down certain settings I reduced the video memory usage and have now eliminated all the crashing (it had put everything on high automatically when I first started it, and it had seemed to run smoothly so I didn't think anything of it at the time). So that is nice.
It would have been nice, however, if there were any kind of message displayed when the video card runs out of VRAM, instead of stuff just quitting silently.