It seems to be video card related because I just tried installing the game on another computer and it was fine. On my computer I have the Elsa Gladiac GeForce 2 card with fairly new drivers (couple months old) and all the armies show up as envelopes or rectangular boxes with a cross. Has anyone seen this? Is there a fix besides getting a different video card?
Those are the "boxes" that I was referring to. As soon as I turned that option off, I was back to the army sprites that I originally thought had been corrupted. I went through the trouble of uninstalling and installing the game 3 times, including the 1.03 patch, restarting my computer several times, swapping video cards, etc, only to find out it was this option which I always turned on because I thought it was related to some stats. I guess I'm still fairly new to grand strategy games (though I've played EU I and II) and I have no idea what these counters are (some NATO symbols?) or in what way they're better. As far as I'm concerned they look like corrupted unit sprites.