i bought galciv2 in france, and patched it to 1.2.
i have no ship texture at all, just the plain shapes (I didn't have them in the retail
version either).
i tried changing the regional settings to english-us (likewise for decimal
signs), as this was mentioned in the forum as a problem for practically
anything coming out of europe, although I can't really see the connection.
anyway, it did not work.
besides, the text files are not always read properly, since most xml
encodings are utf-8, instead of iso latin. easy to change, but i hope
this will be fixed in the future.