Same symptoms.

SMAX worked fine on my old W10 - System. I had to update to W11.

SMAX never worked on my W11 24H2 PC. I tried to run in compatible mode, but it crashed bevor the first turn. Error messeges is that my system needs at least 128 MB of virtual memory. I have 64 GB installed ...
I really would like to continue playing. Is somebody able to help?

Same problem here. Crashes immediately. Apparently this is a known issue on the internet at large, but unless something gets fixed I basically can't play this game anymore which is incredibly annoying. This stupid Windows Update broken more games and things for me than any Windows Update in 25 years, and if this problem continues I'll probably have to end up just installing some random version of Windows 10 with no updates for the future instead.

Hope GoG manages to fix this in some way though, or Microsoft steps up. I recently tried Civilization 6 and was immensely bored, Civilization 5 is alright but not as tactical, and Civ 4 (as well as earlier ones) are way too slow. This game with the right mods (Thinker in particular) is the best 4x of this nature I have ever played and I just want it to work properly.

I believe I found a fix, so I no longer have to run this in a virtual machine.

If you copy ddraw.dll and wined3d.dll from the WineD3D For Windows project (Google it) into your Alien Crossfire installation directory then it should work.

What this does is bypass Win11 implementation of DirectX, translating the API into OpenGL, which my GPU (and hopefully yours) supports.

Hopefully this will work for everyone. It would be nice if GOG and Steam could bundle this into the game files so this game remains accessible to others.

[EDIT] I thought this worked, but it just took more turns to crash. Thankfully my VM install is fine.

You can create a file called DDrawCompat.ini in the game folder and add there CrashDump = mini (or full), it will create a dmp file after crash, maybe it can help figure out why the game is crashing. I'm not skilled enough for this.

Same issue for me - this is what pops up if I am not running PRACX.

If I do run PRACX, it just crashes with no message at all.


Needless to say I have more than 128mb virtual memory (RAM).