Go into the control panel and find the monitor icon, you can set color depth and resolution (if available) there.
Ethernet cards (other then mac clones) need drivers. Once you get the driver you need to install Open transport (found on apples site) to be able to use DHCP. There will be a control panel for networking once the drivers are installed and you need to switch it from the built in serial port (which is default) to the ethernet card, and also direct TCP/IP to ethernet and then you can get networking going to other machines.
Without a working battery all settings for networking are lost when power gets disconnected.
If you have a seperate nubus video card you will probably have options (once drivers are installed) for more color depth and resolution. The IIci has built in video that only does 640x480 max on a SOG (sync on green) monitor. I forget the color depth but its probably 256 colors.