When first launching Civilization V the game crashes back to the desktop, why is this?
We have discovered that if you have any non-English characters in your Windows username the game may crash. This issue has only come to light since the release of the game's demo but we are working quickly to resolve this issue and hope to have a patch released shortly.
If you wish to play the game in the meantime you do have the option of creating an additional Windows user account from within the 'Users' section of the 'Control panel'. Ensure that non-English characters are not used to avoid issues.
Logging into the new account will allow you to log into your Steam account and play the game problem free. Once this issue has been resolved you can then continue to play the from your original account.
Note: If you wish to continue using the same saved game between accounts, choose 'Steam Cloud' when saving.