Atmospheric Perspective Terrain Textures On Battle Map

[Elendil 03]

Mountains viewed from afar appear blurry and in bluish hues due to an effect known as atmospheric perspective.

Photo

Medieval II tries to simulate that effect by replacing the terrain textures with a special set of textures for those mountains in the distance. I noticed the Chivalry II mod uses some very unique brownish textures that IMHO look much more realistic than Vanilla's grayish ones. Here's what I mean (yes, I do use ReShade, but that's not the point):

Screenshot

Compare that to, say, Stainless Steel and the mountains literally pale in comparison (on that note, why is there no green grass in Stainless Steel?). They're also way less detailed:

Screenshot

FYI: Both screenshots were taken on the "Swiss Alps" custom battle map.
My question is: What files in the game contain those textures?

EDIT: It is not the .texture files in data\globallighting.

[Araval]

You made me curious aswell!

[Callistonian]

Any progress on this?

I've been playing Rome: Total War lately and the absurdly heavy-handed atmospheric perspective in Medieval II is really bugging me now. Those textures look much better in Chivalry II, but now I'm wondering if it's possible to remove this effect completely and go back to how it was in RTW where you could see clearly over only slightly exaggerated distances.

I think the RTW battle map must be at like 1:2 or 1:3 scale to the real world just based on how far you can see. On a clear day in the real world, you can see across the English Channel (37 km), you can see Mount Etna from Reggio Calabria (70 km), mainland Spain from Ibiza (90 km), hell, you can clearly see Mount Baker from Vancouver Island over 115 km away. You can see across these distances in RTW but definitely not in M2 because everything is shrouded in thick atmosphere like it's a bad inversion layer day in Los Angeles.

Another thing that really bothers me is the lack of off-map models in M2 like how you could see fleets, wonders, settlements, ports, forts, etc. in the distance in RTW. Even though the off map models were pretty low-poly, the feature grounds every battle you fight solidly within the context of the larger game world and thereby adds a lot of weight to every battle. I know this is getting off the topic of this thread, but I really wanted somewhere to vent about this. It seems like CA shaved off a lot of the best features from RTW when they built M2 on the same engine. Here are some pictures: the terrain lacks the same level of detail in the embellishments as M2, yet as a whole composition, the map is much more beautiful and realistic than M2's battle maps in my opinion.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

View from Illyria across the Straight of Otranto, unrealistically close and high mountains on the Italian side, but who the hell cares? The view is awesome!

View from Illyria across the Gulf of Venice with Ariminum, Patavium, the port of Patavium, and a Roman fleet in view

View from Rhodes north towards Anatolia with Halicarnassus and the Mausoleum in view

View from Rhodes (same battle map as above) to the south towards Crete with the Colossus in the foreground and an exaggeration of the Thrypti mountains of Crete in the distance