Black Screen With Music And Mouse Pointer On Game Launch

Galactic Civ 3 and Dungeon of the Endless have the same issue. Black screen, but sound and mouse seem to work. (both through Steam)
I have an ASUS N550jk with a GTX 850m Nvidia card, i7, 16g RAM, and win 10 64bit.

Nvidia driver is up to date, intel integrated HD 4600 is an old driver, but the newest ASUS has available. I'm wondering if that is the issue, because it was for win 8.

Anyway, I've messed with compatibility settings, steam settings, ran as admin, changed nvidia settings for the program, screen resolution.... I'm out of ideas now. Reddit boards got no answers, and I'm waiting on support through the game, but wanted to try here because MG has some of the most helpful/knowledgeable people I've encountered. Thanks in advance!

 

For the first game, I'm looking here
http://esupport.stardock.com/index....al-galactic-civilizations-iii-troubleshooting
for video drivers it says this

Did you do that? There are 2 screenshots for Nvidia cards.

 

I did see that, but I installed Windows 10 a long time ago, and I just installed the game from steam. I'm hesitating to try reinstalling, simply because I have a terrible internet connection and worry wteam will try to download the whole thing again. But, I will try that now, I guess.

 

You misunderstood the quote. It is NOT a Windows reinstall; this refers to a driver full uninstall, reboot then a clean install.

 

Ahh, then I did do that. I finally got the newest Nvidia drivers to install (unistalled, rebooted, installed manually).

And I reinstalled the game. Still same problem. Just heard back from the support for GalCiv, they had me download an .ini file with the prefs set to minimum, and that made the game try to open in windowed mode, but still the same issue.

I'm thinking it might be the integrated intel graphics drivers? Those are pretty old (pre-Win 10), but I can't install the latest generic intel drivers because it says I need system-specific drivers from ASUS.

 

Have you re-installed Visual C++ and DirectX?
Open plodr's link, scroll down to II. Game loading issues, look at -Re-Installing Redistributables and -Re-Install DirectX.