NeoVim: colorscheme won't work in init.vim; requires command to be typed

Question

I'm new to NeoVim and just getting started.
My init.vim file under NeoVim\share\nvim\runtime\plugin\init.vim successfully sets everything except for the colorscheme and background.
As seen in the image below, the numbers, color column, etc are all being set correctly, but the colorscheme and background commands are not occurring.

However, upon typing the commands :colorscheme default and :set background=dark, everything works fine.

Here's my init.vim file:

let mapleader="`"
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set number
set cursorline
filetype indent on
set wildmenu
set showmatch
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set colorcolumn=80
vmap <C-S-C> "+y
map <C-S-V> "+p
noremap V <C-V>
map <F5> :!j @%
syntax enable
colorscheme default
set background=dark

I'm running NVIM v0.3.1 through CMD on Windows 10.
Other than the init.vim file, this is a fresh install.
Is this a known issue with NeoVim?

Answer 1

I had the same problem with a autocmd ColorScheme * block after the colorscheme line. This worked in vim, but for nvim I had to switch it to:

autocmd ColorScheme *
        \ highlight constant ctermfg=160 |
        …
        \ highlight special ctermfg=11
colorscheme darkblue

I guess in your case it’s the same with set background=dark, try putting the colorscheme line below it (cf. What does :set background=dark do?)