The GoG versions of these games are the original games, patched to the latest version (1.60 and 2.50.1516a iirc) and stripped drm. nothing more, nothing less. i highly doubt that they have the game source code to actually fix bugs.

What crash bug are you talking about? i played both games and cant remember anything specific with ships

The game would crash fairly reliably (unfortunately) when running ships. I forget the exact problem since it has been so long, but it was very infuriating and almost ruined some scenarios.

I think I managed to barely avoid it a couple of times, but it was not good. They never did fix it.

Exception 0xc0000005 at 0x18c0bbd3. Oldest mention I've found is from 2002. To me, it's been happening since the beginning, with completely different computers (both hardware and software). It most commonly happens when there are ships in the level, but it's not limited to that. Over the years I've found that limiting the use of ships helps a little. So instead of planning massive Operation Overlord, I made as few trips as possible and managed to get through problematic levels. But it's no fun.

As far as I know, there's no fix for that. It definitely happens with GOG version. But clearly not to everyone. It must depend on something, some configuration option perhaps. But I've tried everything and nothing helps.

I pretty much lost all hope already, but few days ago I noticed this:

www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/the-settlers-history-collection

It's supposed to be updated versions of all old Settlers games with official support for higher resolution, etc. Clearly, that must involve bigger changes than no-CD crack used for GOG version. So we can only hope that they also fixed bugs like this in the process.