CMAC crushes + missing factions

[mrStoun]

A few years ago I started a game in CMAC, I chose the largest possible planet in the settings (custom setting, so the world become very big). Game version - GOG. The game crashes while the computer is running. I would like to play CMAC here again, but there are fears that I will spend a couple of dozen hours again and stumble upon this bug. I don’t understand if this is a bug in the GOG version, or because the planet is large (I haven’t played such large ones before). How to understand what is the cause of the collapse?

And another bug
I encountered such a bug earlier - the faction was not loaded at the start of the game. That is, you start the game, and there are 6 factions, not 7. I remember that there were problems with Prophet Cha Dawn.
Today I decided to play some more, I found an assembly with a modification, additional fractions on the network, installed it, launched it, in general, not a single faction, except mine, booted (

[bvanevery]

In my modding I have defined Enormous as the largest planet size that doesn't place factions on 1x1 islands.  That's 80x160.  And Giant is the largest size that doesn't generate crashes, IIRC.  That's 126x252.  You go bigger than that, you're asking for it.  I've played bigger maps but whether you get a non-bugged start is luck at that point.  With the larger ones you have to keep rerolling your start until it actually works.  A big problem is you probably don't want to look at the map before you play it, to know if some faction has been crippled.

[DrazharLn]

You might want to use scient's patch or the thinker mod to fix a few crashes. The most common is one to do with interceptors near the top of the map. I've not had the patched game crash on me as far as I remember.

[bvanevery]

I used to get hit by the interceptors problem a lot.  Something changed in Windows 10 and then it stopped happening.  Maybe something with their rendering emulation layers, is my guess.  I don't use Scient's patch.  I use a straight binary.

The most common crash in the straight binary for me nowadays, is when somehow factions have become enemies, and they still have units left in each other's cities.  Someone attacks the city and that torpedoes the game.  I know to go looking for that right off the bat, with the scenario editor.  Sometimes I can change what I do in a turn to get past it, so that I don't need the editor to resolve it and don't get marked as cheating.  Other times I just have to accept getting labeled as a cheater.