When I start a game of DL2, about 5 of of 6 times, the map has strange. sometimes all tans and grays, like desert and wastes, sometimes all blues. It is most irritating to have to keep starting again and again until I get a normally colored map. I am using Vista. Has anyone else had this problem and are there any suggestions for solving it?

Thanks

There are ~7 world types that drastically alter the color of the terrain... Is this what you are experiencing?

Well Great Goddess! Here I thought something was wrong with my game. This is one of those posts you feel quite foolish about and wish you could take back. Does the manual mention this? I thought I had read all the manual. Thanks for replying Zed-Avatar, or I would have spent eternity generating new maps.

The manual mentions that there are different planet types and lists their modifiers for resource amounts (if "Use World Resource Amounts' is checked), but it does not mention that they are different colors.

Alien: High Endurium, Low Iron
Volcanic: High Metals, High Energy
Earth-like: Balanced
Tropical: High Food, Low Metals
Martian: Low Energy
Icy: Low Wood
Dry: Low Food

Merry Meet? :)

I was also actually wondering if the colonist growth rates for the different factions was affected by world types as well... First game I played was on one of the new worlds as Terran, and I have soooo fewww colonists it is painful. The Cyth practically walked across the world and up to my front door and have more colonists on that one territory than I have on my 4..

I don't believe that world type affects population growth rate, only territory type. Plains seem to have the highest growth rate and I believe your landing site also gets a bonus to population to growth rate IF it isn't plains (although it still won't grow quite as fast as plains do). I have noticed that the AI usually seems to have much higher than normal population growth rates.

Interesting. Perhaps to act as a "balancer", since I have heard the Deadlock 2 AI is very weak.

The AI is definitely weak. Sometimes the AI does stupid things like building nothing but fuel depots in a territory.