Road to Independence Black Screen

**jmbuehler** · March 05, 2009, 04:37 AM

Hey guys,

I purchased my version of Empire last afternoon, and after a few hours of download, I was able to start playing this morning.

I dove right in, and went for the Road to Independence campaign/tutorial. Right after I won the 'battle' against some Native Americans, the game went on to load the strategic map, but all I could then see were the buttons, a glowing green circle around what I presume to be a selected settlement, and that's it. The rest is black, although mose-hover reveals the name of varying States.

Has anyone else had this problem?! Been searching all day for a solution to this, but so far no luck...

EDIT: Bump. Looking at all those issues, I can't imagine I am the only one with this problem...

**jmbuehler** · March 05, 2009, 06:13 AM

Bump II.

**CraftyChicken** · March 05, 2009, 08:19 AM

I've got the same problem. Out of curiosity, what are your specs? I'm an i7, 6gb ram w/ ati 4870. I've tried various graphics settings to no avail, while the grand campaign works just fine.

**jmbuehler** · March 05, 2009, 08:44 AM

Originally Posted by CraftyChicken

I've got the same problem. Out of curiosity, what are your specs? I'm an i7, 6gb ram w/ ati 4870. I've tried various graphics settings to no avail, while the grand campaign works just fine.

Same for me, Grand Campaign works fine. I am running 3 GTX280 in TriSLI, Striker II Extreme, 4 GiB DDR3 2000, X3350 @3.6 GHz, 2x 10,000 rpm 150GiB Raptors in RAID0.

I managed to solve it though, by rolling back to Geforce 181.22 and installing the RC1 for Vista Service Pack 2 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en).
I'm assuming your are running Vista X64 because you have 6GiB RAM.

Considering you incurred the same problem with an ATI card, it probably was the SP2 rather than the driver rollback that sorted it out for me, so give it a go and let me know.

**CraftyChicken** · March 05, 2009, 08:59 AM

Interesting. Let me log into Technet and download RC2 and give it a go.

EDIT: I tried latest ATI drivers, still no-go. Going to try the SP now.

**CraftyChicken** · March 05, 2009, 10:17 AM

The SP2 RC2 update did the trick. Before, I'd finish that intro battle and go straight to the campaign map with a black screen. Now, after finishing the battle I get a little video about Jamestown and then go to the campaign map.

-Muchas Gracias

**Taiko88** · March 05, 2009, 10:19 AM

CA reported that the latest drivers are having problems with ETW, and they said to revert back to earlier drivers, specifically the 181.20 or so.

**CraftyChicken** · March 05, 2009, 11:10 AM

I saw that, but interestingly enough, my system worked just fine with my brother's 260gtx w/ latest drivers, while my ATI card didn't work at all with either new or old drivers. (Still referring to the RTI campaign)

Other than that little glitch, I've had no problems. Huge unit scale, full detail and everything is quite smooth. Load times are also faster then demo.

**jmbuehler** · March 05, 2009, 01:05 PM

Originally Posted by CraftyChicken

I saw that, but interestingly enough, my system worked just fine with my brother's 260gtx w/ latest drivers, while my ATI card didn't work at all with either new or old drivers. (Still referring to the RTI campaign)

Other than that little glitch, I've had no problems. Huge unit scale, full detail and everything is quite smooth. Load times are also faster then demo.

It happened exactly the same way for me. I had never seen that little video before. Very strange, but I'm glad you got it to work as well.