Any ideas on how to get rid of my lovely plaid battlefields?
This is as close as I could come to reproducing your problem. It looks like you're missing a base texture somewhere, or the texture has been overwritten by another one.
I'm sure you've tried everything, but let me go through a few ideas and see if it sparks any ideas.
First of all, what are your weather settings for the battle? Do you get the same problem with Summer, Hot and Dry?
Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game? Also, try a different folder than Program Files. C:\Games\ for example, just to avoid admin account problems. If you're actually missing a texture file, a total reinstall should fix it.
If you've edited or replaced any files in the game it may have messed up somewhere. Does the same thing happen with a totally new install with no changes?
OK, now we're down to your graphics card. How much video RAM do you have? Is it integrated graphics like you would find on a laptop? Those often give odd errors.
I've seen strange things in other games that act like my video RAM has gotten fragmented. This is solved with a reboot, preferably with a total shutdown of the system first.
If none of this has any effect, the last resort is to update your video drivers. I normally don't recommend this unless you've got a known problem with a specific video driver version. If you do update the drivers, make sure to write down the old version and the new version so that if it solves the problem we'll have documentation about at least one driver version that doesn't work.
Good luck.
Hook