Air Cover and game crashes

[Tokamak]

I have heard that if you have an interceptor (ie a needlejet with Air Superiority) parked somewhere, it will protect your units within a certain radius, actually taking off in mid-turn and intercepting enemy needlejets.

However, I have never seen this happen, because whenever a situation like this arrives, the game crashes. Anyone else have this problem?

[mrdynamic]

I have had the same error and found a fix for it. The specific error I was getting was a TERRANX.EXE error. It would occur when using needlejets and sometimes choppers. This is what I did to fix it:

Before starting the game do the following.

CTRL+ALT+DEL
to bring up the task list of items running.

Click on each task and click the END TASK control button.

Do this to all tasks EXCEPT: systray and explorer.

Now start the game and you should no longer get the error you spke off.

[Tokamak]

Hey thanks! That was fast!

I was getting a terranx.exe error, just like you. I'll try this out. Not being able to use interceptors has given me a very distorted view of air defense. I can't wait to try it out!

[Tokamak]

Just got the chance to try it out! It works great!

One thing though, for anyone else who might have this problem. Not all of your active programs show up on the Alt+Del+Cntrl window. When I first tried this, interceptors still crashed my game. I checked the lower left corner, and sure enough, that pesky task scheduler was still running! When I turned it off, things started woirking fine. In fact, the game runs smoother in general now.

Thanks again!

[johndmuller]

Ideally, it would be better to figure out exactly what process was the culprit as you might want to keep some of those tasks running (I sometimes find that the calculator is handy for making exact rush build computations). I've seen the intellimouse drivers blamed for this crash and if you have a save game that reliably generates the crash, you could experiment with different tasks. Sometimes it is hard to tell what the task is from its name though.

There is an unpleasant aspect to the scrambling in that a severely weakened fighter will go out and get killed when your unit might have been fine without help (as with AAA) or else a fighter that you were planning to use is no longer available (I don't remember whether you get to use (if any) remaining movement after a scramble).

There may be a further possible disadvantage to scrambling - I'm not sure, but it may be that a scrambling fighter (Air Superiority) will fight an attacking bomber (no Air Superiority) at weapon vs weapon odds, while if the fighter were attacking in its turn, it would be weapon (fighter) to armor (bomber); if that is so, it would make a big difference although in some cases it would be better than letting the bomber attack.

I think that it would have been better if the scrambling was left to "on-alert" and/or the "Hold" command could be used to keep fighters from scrambling when you don't want them to.

[Tokamak]

After further experimentation, I can't tell what causes the problem. Sometimes it crashes, sometimes it doesn't. It varies from game to game. If it doesn't crash the first time, it will not crash until I restart.

Unfortunately, Interceptors don't get their 100% Air Superiority bonus when scrambling. This generally means you will be fighting at 1:1 odds. I make it a point to have all of my interceptors at Elite status striaght out of the box.

Sucessful air cover requires quantity. I keep a good number of fresh intercepors at bases with vulnerable units (formers, cralwers). When one gets torn up in a fight with a bomber, I send it back into a core base for repairs, and replace it with a fresh one from further back. This way, only 100% healthy jets are ever scrambling.

Interceptors get thier full moverment after scrambling, which is nice. They can just land, or pick off any surviving bombers from last turn's dogfights.

[Misotu]

On the terranx problem, my experience has been that simply killing the mouse wheel software does the trick 95% of the time. I sometimes have to disable the virus check program too.

I find scrambling interceptors more of a handicap than an advantage. They have poor odds against an attacking bomber by comparison with a decent garrison, but the real killer is in MP, where an opponent is using nervegas. Given tech parity (roughly), an x bomber will slaughter an interceptor in-base, halving the city size and completely ignoring your best armour/AAA/creche/aero/etc defenders. Interceptors get no benefit from tachyons or aerospace

They do have their uses (particularly for some air power when running FM, or for preventing drops where you don't have aero) but on the whole, they make me nervous