*** MILD SPOILER ***

I got through to the last levels of Syndicate Wars, where you fail instantly if you cannot pick up time bombs. Then my agents refuse to pick up bombs, wait around idly, then get blown up. Even when they have many spare slots. This is such a pain, especially when you cannot save mid-way through the last few levels.

I'm not going to waste more time with this, but be warned: you might not be able to finish this game because of this bug.

Yep, encountered the same issue and also gave up. I recall reading that there is a trick to get round that bug but I can't recall it at all. Unfortunately it's not the last level. There's one more level after it that takes place on the surface of the moon iirc.

Perhaps the level skip cheat will work but I'm not sure.

How about dropping bombs in some safe/already cleaned place and using for bomb pick-ups same agents? That's inconvenient workaround, but workaround nonetheless.

I can't tell why but occasionally I can't either equip my agent with e.g. Nuclear Grenades or Gas containers, in gerenal anything with quantity 1-4. At other times I buy one piece of Bomb and get 2 or I simply (while equipping Agents) reassign one bomb to other Agent which make it multiply ^^. Other times I can have 1 piece of equipment more than allowed. It must be some bug in implementation.

Buying/selling items to make sure there are no "phantom" items does not improve anything.

It is just sad when you go to Colombo and have to leave behind your Agents w/ skin lvl 2,3 and/or 4 (lvl 1 is pointless, but lvl 3 can be make winning the game sooner than later

The bug definitely sucks and is very very annoying without a doubt. However it is manageable once you know what to do about it...

This is what I found out about the bug, and I will detail another bug on the same map that happens very often on the Windows port and rarely on Dos / Dosbox.

First off - Try to use Agents 3 and 4 as your bomb pick-up people. I heard that those agent numbers are less buggy for this. I am not sure if it is a placebo effect or not though, but I read that it helps...

Now with that out of the way - what REALLY makes a difference is this : try to complete the map on your first try. I have confirmed it myself by restarting the level multiple times, that the bomb bug pops up randomly after restarting the level. It is never there for the first time you get to the Orbital Station. And going off memory, you can drop a item you are carrying and you won't even be able to pick that up either - this is a great way to test it if you got the bug occurring on your restart or not. It does not always happen on the first map restart or even the second, but once it does happen it will always be that way until you close the game down entirely and reload your save to start from Colombo again.

The other bug that I have seen and it is also game breaking, is where when you have all four agents grouped that there is a chance of one of them getting teleported outside of the map boundary...He will be out there in space, you can still move him, but he can't get back onto the space platform. My way of avoiding that was to literally only control a single agent at a time, and to draw the enemies back to my team which was high on the "blue drugs" and would wipe them out fast with long range rifles...keep your eyes peeled for the bomb of course and use agent 3 or 4 to pick it up.

Once you do it that way it removes the stupid bug-element from ruining your mission, and it is very doable, but like I said - if you can't pick up bombs then try and drop one of your items and see if you can pick it up...If not then you need to entirely quit the game to desktop, then restart and load up your save at Colombo. In that case - Make sure to use Clone shields on your team to rush to the elevator so that you can bypass that level and advance to the Orbital Station in a timely manner. Yes, the bug sucks big time, but it is able to be worked around with patience and knowing how to deal with it. The final level is fun & chaotic and worth seeing...If you need help on beating it, there are some good videos on Youtube about it - it also has no bugs.

Edit: Re-read your post and can see you are referring to the bomb bug. Nvm.

I found if inequip 4 new agents(expensive I know) the problem is solved for several levels of bomb pickups. Then wash, rinse, repeat.

I think this was a bug even on the original game back in the day. The issue seems to be that if none of your agents has high explosive at all, they can't pick up ones dropped in levels, it doesn't just happen in the space station level, I've had it in other levels too. Of course, the only level where it is a huge problem is the space station because it's mission failed if an explosive goes off.

The work around for this is to make sure one of your agents always has at least one high explosive and they can then continue to pick up more. I've never had the issue happen if one agent has one high explosive already. So on the final 3 levels I make sure one agent goes into it with one high explosive. In the space station you'll need to keep dropping explosives using the Z key so you can keep picking more up but make sure to only ever drop 3 so that the agent keeps one.

If anyone is interested in technical aspects:

the game handles owning weapons as flags in 32-bit value. For weapons with quantities, there is an 8-bit value in addition to these flags - it's called FourPack.

The issue is that it was possible to deplete the FourPacks to 0 without losing the weapon. When that happened, using the consumable weapon, or selling, or moving to other agents, resulted in the flag being cleared and the FourPack being decremented. Decrementing 0 gives 255 - so the weapon was not marked as being in possession, but internally the game though the agent has a huge quantity of said weapon, disallowing pickup at last moment.

Here is the fixed code for that:
https://github.com/swfans/swars/blob/master/src/weapon.c#L552