black terrain lessens with play

[maccool]

I've been using the dark terrain as an additional handicap (it's slightly confusing to try visualizing w/o the terrain details and tougher to decide on some improvements). I have found the area of black terrain decreases as the game progresses (a small bit of terrain becomes visible and increases in size). The area where the visibility starts (and the time at which it starts happening) is different for each game. It is never at the center, always starts at the edges. It is also bigger the "farther out" I zoom (obviously as the focus of zoom in is toward black terrain).

I've attached 2 images that shows the area and what happens when I shift the viewing area (I reduced the color depth to 256 to reduce the sizes). Unfortunately, I don't have images from previous games to give a comparison, but I think the one's I have with the description gives a general idea.

 

[GeneralMikeIII]

I believe I saw this in another thread somewhere on here, but I don't remember exactly where.

What it is is that the Fog Of War is messed up on the release edition (I had this problem, downloaded the patch, and it fixed it). It is really hard to try to explain why it happens, but it is something to the effect of the FoW only is revealed in the center of the map, instead of where you have units. There are several ways to "fix" this, but as I mentioned the patch took care of this for me. Good luck.

 

[maccool]

Unfortunately, I haven't found the other references to it and I can't apply the patch. I have a direct2drive download and the patch wouldn't correctly recognize the installation. Whee!

Now that I know another fix was referenced in a forum and what I'm looking for I may find it. If you happen across the ways to fix this other than the patch, I'd appreciate the heads up. Thanks for the info.

 

[GeneralMikeIII]

o boy, here we go...

Firstly, the name of the thread was "Terrain is Dark..." and it is like 13 pages long now, so to save you some time...

What I did before the patch was: Start a new game. Pick all your game settings and Civ and stuff like that, they don't matter. Right when the game starts, go to the world editor (from the in-game main menu). The tool bar on the upper-right-hand side has two rows of buttons. On the bottom row, almost all the way to the right, there is a button that says "reveal map mode" when you put your mouse over it (it is brown and has a crosshair on it, if I remember right). Click that button, and a third row of buttons pops up. One of the buttons on that third row says "reveal mode on" or something like that (I think it is mostly blue and looks "lit up"). Click that button, and exit the world builder. This will reveal the whole map, so it takes away a little strategy, but you still can't see the enemy units, so it isn't too bad. The whole map will be kinda opaque looking, but you can see your units and it is a lot easier to play as opposed to not being able to see anything.

Other "fixes" where there too. One involved editing an XML file or something like that, but I think it did the same thing (I didn't try this one, so I can't give any more input than I guess it worked for some people).

The last "fix" was just wandering everywhere looking for the middle of the map, then taking a unit and parking it in the middle of the map (once you have determined where that is). If you use a big map, that may mean wasting several units. One guy suggested starting a game, saving it, then quitting. Then on the post game screen, he would note where the middle of the map was and load the game and send a scout or warrior to the middle of the map.

As I said, I like the first way best, so I recommend that one. You can try these others too, though.

NOTE: None of these address the Cheshire cat problem, which you probably have too, because everyone else with the black terrain problem had the floating eyes and floating grins in place of the leaderheads.

 

[maccool]

Oddly enough, I've never seen the "Chesire Cat" or the "white eyes" problems that others have complained of. Mine has only been the dark/black map.