Posted August 21, 2021

Since I've been playing the GOG release (I got it around 2010??) I didn't have a single problem. Since then, I also changed playstyle. Back in the day, I used to be super careful and play on defensive mode, spamming the map full of towers. Since I switched to playing the game more aggressively and pretty much not building any turrets anymore, I didn't have a single crash.
I still applied the dos32a patch to see if dosbox' speed would improve, never seen any problem after that either.
The only problem I still had was the "countdown to zero" problem, when the computer's turn would never end. The solution I found to that was constantly moving the map while the A.I. turn's lasts, it's more effective if you scroll the map with the mouse than with the keyboard. It seems like if you keep your CPU "occupied" scrolling the mouse makes the AI behave properly. The reason for that I don't know, I just know that doing this works.
And please, always use alternating saves, missions in this game are long, don't rely on a single save. Change slots every 5 turns or so, so you can easily go back in time if anything happens.
Oh wait, I remember another thing: regarding the "AI neverending turn" thingy, I manually edited the MAX.INI file in order to increase turn times. I set the player's turn to the maximum possible value (16 minutes if I recall correctly) and the "End Turn" timer to 999 or something like that. Never had a problem since. But I still scroll the map during the AI's turn in order to make it pass faster. If I leave the computer untouched while the AI moves, it seems to last much longer, for some reason.
It's really really sad to see such an incredible game being treated this way, the guys allegedly lost the source code?? After programming the "best skirmish AI in a game ever" ?? Yeah, what a fantastic move for your programming career right there, holy baby jesus... And really sad to see that the sequel MAX2 was also riddled with bugs. What's wrong with those guys? Were their offices cursed or what? Amazing... When you see things like OpenXcom or even Diablo being recently reverse-engineered, you start to wonder if the same would happen to MAX if only the developers took a little more care of it.