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.

Not sure GOG will fix it, i contacted the support, gave them a link to this forum thread and got a generic reply. I am annoyed,