I just launched the game a few minutes ago and it showed me this:

I have never seen any game on steam say performing installation step so and so of 37. Usually it's just 2 or 3 steps of the directx and other stuff. This is not the first time I've launched the game. I've been playing it on/off this week for a total of 12hrs. Is this because of a new patch? Is it just me or have some of you seen this too? Googling this got me nowhere.

And minutes later it's now of step 15 of 37. WTF.

Edit: Formatting image.

That's crazy! The most install steps I've seen is 5 or 6. Game is launching fine for me. Maybe verify the integrity of the game cache?

Never seen that on my install - the patch just automatically updated for me but I guess it could have been that but sounds more like it's downloading the whole game again?

Well I let it run for the whole 37 steps and it launched just fine. But now on every launch it's doing this "first time setup". For now, I'm just cancelling out of it and bypassing this whole step but this is really annoying.

Know it might be a nightmare to reinstall completely on the time front but have you tried that to see if it clears things up? Doesn't seem to be much good support right now sadly, looks like I'm unlikely to ever see any effort from Relic on the SLI support.

Contact Steam support, this shouldn't be happening.

Yeah, I've seen the "installing # of 37" for more than just CoH2 though.
It's just Steam being janky (it does that sometimes) and the "first time setup" every time someone launches a game is happening to more and more people with more and more games. It'll probably get fixed as it usually does.

I keep getting the message about Steam running in compatability mode and no idea how to fix that either. Oh well it's just one box to close before the game starts.

@humanity: Don't know if this will help but a few people seem to have found it useful to get rid of the compatibility mode error - http://joshmccarty.com/2012/01/turn-off-compatibility-mode-for-steam/

@jarowdowsky: This helped, thanks dood.