Im trying the 3rd. Time to get in Touch with civ 5 (Vox populi) and one of the things i miss most is information. Even with a lot of UI mods, the civ 5 interface looks full of useless Information. For the relevant Information you have to klick yourself to a lot of menues and there are nearly zero overviews.
And the worst thing: no Graphs.
Never claimed the later iterations of Civ got it right
The 5 and 6 are good games in their own right, they just don't feel like Civ games to me. They feel like Civ-inspired board games. Lots of design decisions (1UPT, districts) brought them much close to the look, feel and gameplay of a nice board game, which isn't bad by itself, I just wish we also had a modern game that followed 1-4 general direction.
As far as the UI is concerned, it just feels... Old. I don't really know how to put it better - but it feels like the same-generation UI as, speaking of Paradox games, EU2 or Vic1 had - and their games might have gotten better or worse over the years (it's all in the eye of the beholder), but one thing I'm definitely sure of, is that EU4 interface works so much better than that of EU2 (or CK3 vs CK1, for another continued game series).
I've done a bit more troubleshooting on the black graphics.
I previously used "Dragon UnPacker 5" when trying to unpack "RealisticTerrain.FPK". PakBuild was able to unpack it without issue. Unpacking and removing "RealisticTerrain.FPK" solved the issue.
Running in windowed mode also solved the issue. However, that also decreased the resolution severely depending on the zoom. It also disabled the ability to use the mouse to move the field of view around. So, not acceptable to me.
Clearing the cache had no effect.
Running on integrated graphics also had no effect.
Thanks for being so thorough. The windowed part sounds interesting - basically it means that it has something to do with video drivers / shaders. What irks me the most is that I can't reproduce it on my side to troubleshoot.
I've tried rebooting and clearing the cache multiple times. Best I could do was get the land to appear again. Not sure what else I'm missing.
I actually feel there are two separate issues at work here. The one with all-black terrain that is addressed by clearing cache, and another with black water, that isn't. Myself, I only ran into all-black terrain, so I have no idea how the black water issue can be solved.
My understanding is that deleting the profiles folder will reset the graphics settings, along with all other settings on the Options screen. I'd at least make a backup so that the old settings can be restored if it turns out that the reset doesn't help.
Aren't all settings simply kept in the ini file in My Documents/My Games/Beyond the Sword folder?
