The first problem I cant help with, sorry.

The problem with the collor is that you have not made the sprites for your new faction yet. When the zoom is too far away from a unit they are diplayed as sprites instead of the complex 3-d models in order to conserve computer resources. I know the game has a sprite generator, but I'm not familiar with how it works, look around for how to make sprites and you should find your answer easy enough.