What causes features of the game to go dark?

[ziek]

Hi. I'm fairly new to this game and brand new in this forum. I have noticed in a few games I've played that it happens that the features of the game -- farms, cities, ships, etc. go dark for a period of time and slowly recover their color and details. It has happened twice, I've noticed, after I had a negotiation and traded or gave away a technology. I don't think it was electricity (hence the "lights out" look?). And once it was when the money went very low after I upgraded my military population a little too quickly. I don't know if that was related at all to the blackout. Just trying to connect dots.

Anybody else have this experience? Any tips on avoiding it or recovering from it?
Thanks. I will appreciate any input and look forward to learning from this group.

Ziek.

 

[Sisiutil]

There are two possibilities. One is a technical problem that probably requires an upgrade of your video card to fix. The other is that what you're seeing is the "fog" that is part of the game, with tiles not "lit up" by either the nearby presence of one of your units or by sufficient espionage turning slightly dark.

Can you include some screenshots of examples of what you're seeing?

 

[yatta77]

^^___ replying to the OP, and cross posting with the post above (and I likely misunderstood the issue here).

If you lose or trade the last one of a resource (example: iron) the icons of the units that needs that resource (for iron an example is the crossbowman) will be "grayed out" and you cannot build them anymore. You can again when regaining that resource somehow.

I'm not sure about being this the problem you refer to, just shooting in the dark since you talk about trading a resource.

Btw, welcome!

 

[ziek]

Thanks for the reply. I'm playing on a new MacBook Pro. I would be surprised if the video card is insufficient, but it's possible. How do I make a screen shot to post? I have a game saved where this is going on.

 

[ziek]

Interesting about the resources, yatta. I will keep that in mind, but I'm sure that is not what happened. I never traded a last one of any resources. I believe this condition followed trading or giving a technology.

 

[Sisiutil]

I'm not familiar with Macs, but on a PC, you press the PrtScn key and your screenshots go into username/documents/my games/Beyond the Sword/ScreenShots. You then need to upload the screenshot to a hosting site like Photobucket. Copy the HTML link to the image from within Photobucket and paste it into a post here using the "Insert Image" button in the Advanced post composer.

 

[Turin Turumarth]

This happened to me too, but only on vanilla civ 4 and not bts. The ice would go black and then a few turns later the game would crash.