Crusader Kings II Forum

Make a new bottle - install .NET 2.0 service packs, C++ 2010, Modern DirectX and Steam.

Download the game off Steam (should yours be on it). Do not run it after downloading via Steam. Go to the bottle's Control Panel, Wine Configuration, and in the graphics tab - enable "Emulate virtual desktop". Don't fuss over the desktop size - the game will resize the window anyway according to the in-game resolution.

Do not run the game from Steam, in 11.2 it will not work. Instead, use the Run Command dialog - find the game's ck2game.exe file, enable "Create log file" in debug options and put "warn+heap" (without quotes, as-is) into the other. Start the game. If it seems stuck loading something too long - it is, use the Terminate windows applications to kill it, and try running it again. At some point in time, rather soon for me (2-3 tries), the game will load and will be graphically fine - except for sound; which will have slight and very annoying stutters.

Save games aren't loadable back - while the game makes them fine (in your ~/Paradox Games... egh), it does not see them to load them back in.

An explanation of some things that were necessary... or not, but I did them to get it to work:

• .NET 2.0 is necessary for the ck2game.exe which is written in .NET to work - and this loads the DLCs, if you bought any. If ck2game.exe is not launching for you, you can bypass the .NET and run ck2.exe directly - however that will not load DLC content.
• Emulate virtual desktop is necessary because once you leave the games window if it's in native fullscreen, it will "freeze" and there's nothing you can do to get it back. The game will size this window to the resolution you've set in-game - so change the resolution in-game only.
• warn+heap is necessary to get the game to load at all - without this, it just crashes 100% of the time. Yes, it does make a log file each time which is bothersome, though if you give the log files the same name, you'll only have one.
• I don't know how to fix the sound stutter yet, and I'm no expert on CX at all, so someone else will have to pitch in.

Thanks for the tips Vadim.

I've done everything you've suggested however I can't locate the .exe file. I have purchased the game on Steam, then right clicked it and selected Backup Game Files. When I save it locally, it saves the files in .csd and .csm files - I presume I'm doing something wrong at this stage.

Can you clarify? Hope to get it working as it looks like a great game (shame about the save games - did anyone get back to you on how to make that work??).

Just played a 7 hour long session last night of this using Crossover 12, and it worked flawlessly with the following setup/wine tweaks:

System specs:

Fedora 17 x86_64, running kernel 3.6.9-2
Intel Core i7 2600k, OC'ed to 4.4GHz
16 GB DDR3 RAM
128 GB SSD (game/OS install)
1.5TB 5400RPM HDD (debug log pointed here)
nVidia 660 GTX, 2 GB RAM, driver version 304.64-1
-- 1920x1080 resolution
-- Also acting as sound card, connected to monitor via HDMI

Game settings:

All expansions/DLC enabled
Fullscreen @ 1920x1080
Anti-aliasing set to 4x

Wine Bottle:

Installed via Steam into a bottle installed using the Civilization 5 CrossTie.
Windows version changed in winecfg to be Windows 7.
DX9 and DX10 native overrides installed
Must use warn+heap debug logging as indicated in the OP
Emulate virtual desktop enabled as described in the OP
Launch using ck2game.exe rather than from Steam as described in the OP
Added/edited the following values to the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> Direct3D:
-- DirectDrawRenderer (string) -> opengl (default, but I prefer having it explicitly defined)
-- StrictDrawOrdering (string) -> disabled
-- UseGLSL (string) -> enabled
-- Crossover was misidentifying my video card as an nVidia 8800 GT with 128MB RAM, so I added its properties to the registry in this location:
VideoMemorySize (string) -> your video cards memory size in MB.
VideoPciDeviceID (DWORD hex) -> Hex code for the device as provided by lspci
** VideoPciVendorID (DWORD hex) -> Hex code for the vendor as provided by lspci

Added a silver rating to it -- really, with these tweaks, it runs flawlessly with no hitches, slowdowns, or sound/video issues/stutters, but since there's this many tweaks that need to go into it (and I haven't finished a crosstie yet), I wasn't comfortable giving it a gold. Hopefully this all becomes moot anyway as CK2 is one of the games supported by Steam in it's Linux Client when it goes GA (the install doesn't provide the executable in the current beta), but until then, it runs better on my Linux box in Crossover than it does on my Mac using the native Mac client!