Can not see base terrain

[Matthew Taylor]

I can not see the base terrain type, only resources, production, etc.
I see the units and cities ok.

Using a Dell Lattitude 840C, 1 GB memory
Geforce4 440 Go Video Card.

I emailed Take2 for support, got an aknowledgment, but no help was offered.

Thanks

Matthew

[dsmfive]

I have the same machine (running Win2000 Pro) with the same problems initially. But following the "Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!" thread helped a lot and got rid of not only the black terrain problem, but also the shiny leader faces.

Here's what I did:

1) updating video drivers from www.dell.com didn't work to fix the problem, but I did also update the bios on the card (also from the Dell site) which might have contributed.

2) updated the system's flash bios with the files from www.dell.com

3) turned all of the acceleration settings (antialiasing, etc) to minimum settings, and graphics on the game to LOW.

4) set my Page file size to 1.5 GB

5) downloaded the 77.58 driver set from www.laptopvideo2go.com (this one seems to be specific for these Dell machines).

The game worked fine without black screen or shiny faces after this. I suspect the 77.58 driver did the trick, but any of items 1 to 4 might have helped. The game still gets choppy after an hour or so of play and needs a full system shutdown and restart to correct this. But it is playable and enjoyable.

I'd suggest trying the 77.58 driver first along with the video settings and page file before bothering with the bios stuff. I haven't tried fiddling with the graphic card settings or increasing the game graphics to see if they really need to be set that low for optimal performance.

Hope that helps.