I just installed the game (German Version) and ran into a bit of trouble: Of my starting ships the colony ship is visible, but without textures and lighting, the flag ship clickable right next to Earth and is invisible. I checked the ship designer, apparently certain ship modules, including the tiny hull, just don't want to display. Planets & stars seem to show up just fine.

I updated the game (1.2), DirectX (9.0c) and my graphic card drivers. I rebooted several times, tried different races, moved around with the ships over a few turns, tried almost all possible combinations of the options in the "graphics" menu, changed the language settings to US. The only change observable - aside of obvious resolution changes - was that lighting effects were applied to the ships when I switched off the textures.

My PC is a semi-recent model [AMD Athlon 3500+, NVidia Geforce 6800+ (256 MB), 1 GB RAM] and should be able to run the graphics of the game. I would be thankful for some help, chasing invisible ships through space turned out to be a bit dissatisfactory on the long run.

By the way, I don't get sound during the intro movie. In-Game everything seems to be fine, I'd rather see my graphics problem resolved.