18-03-2001 01:30									#1
	Interceptor / Game Crashing II Get a bigger avatar today!

Hello!

I posted some weeks ago. Found out what was causing the game crashes. But even though I now avoid building interceptor needlejets, it crashes with SAM-copters too! And once even in reverse, when I attacked one of the computers foils.

So what am I to do? While playing Pirates, I could use SAM-foils, but SAM-speeders just ain't that effective at all.

Am I forced to let the bastards 'air-walk' all over me, just so I can play the game? What do you do? You must have played the game (including its latter stages) tens of thousands of times (all people here considered) - so how do you MANAGE it?

Help!!!

	18-03-2001 04:32									#2
	Increase the size of your Attachments

A lot of the steady players have managed to find some sort of fix. For some disabling the virus detector does the trick. For some it is the wheelmouse. I know of one player who claims that shutting off the audio fixes the problem. In the readme file I think there is also a suggestion that a minor change to one file might do the trick. You might even want to try reinstalling the program, one player recently mentioned that some of the files can get corrupted.

Regrettably, I personally have not had any success in a fix. My ways of going around the problem include shutting off ironman. You can still play ironman style but you don't have to worry about going back and repeating a bunch of turns after a crash. Sometimes you can replay a turn and the AI will react differently, avoiding the crash. Somewhat strangely, I have found that zooming way in before replaying the crashing turn sometimes avoids the crash. You heard right. If you can't see the interceptor scrambling, sometimes the game won't crash.


If that still doesn't work you can try to play your turn differently so that the unit intercepting or the intercepted unit is not in the same place when the AI has its turn.

Another option is just to not build SAM planes and choppers. Against the AI you should still be able to win easily, although perhaps not quite as quickly. Build a mess of regular planes and choppers and keep the enemy AI from doing the same. This strategy works best if you have a tech lead.

As I mentioned in your last thread, worst case scenario is to play SMAC instead of SMACX. The bugs are different, but at least you can play the game. For most of us, terran.exe is much more stable than the terranx.exe. In SMACX SP I also have to avoid the upper and lower edges of the map as I also find the game can crash just by me sending a unit there.

It has been said before, even by me, but shame on Firaxis for not coming out with the next patch they promised. For that matter shame on them for saying that they would only do one patch or two patches depending on how we voted. The game should have been patched until the most serious bugs were corrected. It seems obvious that not a heck of a lot of thought went into the initial SMACX release. At that point a lot of the trumpeted special abilities such as Aki's Techsteal always on, did not work.