Do some of the missions have timers? On two occasions, while things were going well
for me, I got "mission failed" for no apparent reason. The first time was on 'River Suicide something' (the old demo stage), and the second time on the 'Death from above' survivor mission. Did I miss something in the briefing or has
this also happened to somebody else?

I've been getting the same thing as well, I'm only on mission 3 of the Evolved campaign and I've already had two missions where I got a "Mission Failed" for no apparent reason that I can see. I can't even get past the 3rd mission because I have no idea why it keeps failing me. Was hoping someone had an idea of what's going on, or maybe knows a way to disable mission parameters.

It's not a good thing if they don't show us the timer!

For what it's worth, I've found some cheat codes that will enable you to just win the missions you're stuck on. I haven't tried them yet so no clue if they work or not.

http://melbournehouse.kknd2.com/cheats.html

It's a bug that happened in the retail CD version of the game as well, not sure what triggers it. Seems to be an issue with newer hardware. Exiting the game and reloading an earlier save usually fixes it.

Then GOG should not sell a game that is faulty and not working on new systems (if its true what H2IWclassic said).

They should not release it then as Good Old Game but cannot run on new systems.

I have this problem as well and it frustrates and irritates the crap out of me if my missions keep on failing about 10min to 15min in the mission, i have not even finished building and then getting that message.

They should either fix this or remove game from shop and not sell it since it has a major bug then.

Just my opinion but you cannot play nor enjoy a game like that.

Have you contacted their tech support?

Hi H2IWclassic, yes i did contact support, this would be my 3rd game i report and ask for help from support and this would be my 3rd game where it was not resolved.
I will give GOG credit for at least replying to my initial (first) support calls but they do not resolve it at all. The 2 other games still not resolved but GOG did at least reply to me to try and help with basic answers.
I recon this game would be the 3rd and will not be resolved as well.
I have bought almost their whole catalogue of games here but have only played (tested) like 25 of them so far.
I just wish the support could be a bit better, you get the initial reply and basic help but then the support just fade away even when you reply and say it still does not work after you did what they said and then BOOM, no replies after that. It feels like support just ignore you and wishes you stay away and leave the problem. This is my opinion with the support i received. Maybe other people got better support but this is how i was helped. I can also understand that these are old game and you could have problems on new systems but when users report or log calls then i would at least expect them to test better and list the problems received so that customers could make a better judgement call if they still want to buy the game.

I've also sadly encountered the problem, reloaded the map and got it again far shorter into it so its certainly no timer factor. If this is true then there is a chance that GOG could fix the issue if its a problem with modern hardware. That said going into old game code and trying to fix things is an utter nightmare, especially if they only have the retail distribution code and not the full master code to work from. Even then trying to get into the workings of a game (even older "simpler" games) is a nightmare of coding. It's a lot of hours just to find things and then work out how they are actually working or what thought process the designers were using at the time. It's a lot of hours and GOG is only a smaller team.

My hope is that the issue can be resolved and a solution found; all we can do as fans is try reloading levels and also posting any and all findings we have to their support line so that they've the most information to work with.

Thank you! that seems to work and the one time it didn't work I got it to work by restarting the game, loading a save game from just before the 'mission failed' , saving again and reloading that save after a second game restart. A little annoying but at least I only ran into the issue on 3 levels.

Restarting and reloading did help for some time, but now I am at the later Evolved missions and the missions fail nevertheless (I was able to complete the Symmetrics campaign with this trick, annoying as it is). I did not have these problems when I played with an Athlon Turion 64 CPU, which is, as the name says, already a 64-Bit CPU. Maybe an issue with multi core CPUs, this could be tested within a virtual machine, if the game works there.

EDIT

Ok restarting and reloading is wokring again, I've waited for some minutes this time before doing so. Funny.

It doesn't occur on an old Windows 98\Pentium 3 system I have here, so the issue appears to be connected to newer versions of Windows and\or newer processors.

I still have XP, so this is not OS related. I did not have this with XP/Athon 64 Turion, but with XP/Core 2 Quad.

I still have this problem and was told by GOG that they do not have this problem, then in another mail from them they say they knew about this and thought the problem was fixed, then a 3rd reply (all different people) i was told they do not have this problem at the specific missions i told them where i had the problem. It is clear with all the people replying here that its just not me. I got the impression from GOG that i was only one and it felt like they were in a way saying i am lying about my problem. I would really appreciate it if all you guys having the same problem to please log a support with GOG and even point them to this discussion because it is clear that this game has problems. Thanks

Did you try running in Windows 98 compatibility mode?