[Zwischy]

You're right, the PLANETARY defenses, or PDPs are little threat (though I HAVE had an orange ship occasionally blown up because it was on Polar orbit, which is the best way to get a ship dead), but the surface-to-air lasers are absolute death on tech levels 6 and 7. The SALs shoot down your dropships as they try to land on the pad and when they're actually sitting on the pad. Since the dropships carry your warriors and your warriors are the hammer blow which brings down enemy hardpoints, it is VITAL to keep your dropships from getting gunned down as they attempt to reach the surface.

Ever see the message 'Drop ship destroyed by defensive fire?' This means you just lost 6000 warriors. That's a huge chunk of troops to lose in one shot.

ALWAYS call for reinforcements from HQ. It doesn't really cost you much in the way of mission rating, and having that many more fresh troops will actually save you troop deaths in the long run. More legions will have the opportunity to gain battle value more quickly, and the more 1000 troop units you can throw at the computer the better.

As for keeping shock troops alive, you're right, they die easily. You have to be thoughtful (notice I said thoughtful, not cautious) how many shock troops you commit to a given drop and understand feints and Withdrawing individual cohorts become important. Ever notice how the enemy units move toward your shock troops when they appear in the city? The more shock troops you land in a quadrant, the more city troops are likely to react and move towards them. This is what's important in a feint - not the damage your shock troops can do, but rather how many enemy they can get to move towards them which ideally leaves another quadrant open for another shock troop drop. You can land shock troops in a quadrant then have them race toward the corner of the city using command of individual cohorts to pull as many units towards them as possible. Three cohorts is usually required to get any movement; send four or five if you think you need to draw off a lot of enemy units. Don't be afraid to let them die, but if you can get a construction drop running before your feint units are engaged in combat (enemy units adjacent to them), do use the Withdraw command to save them for a future feint.

However, don't expect the enemy to move ALL its troops toward your feint - some near the central parts of a city will stay there to defend it. It might be necessary to drop TWO feint assaults in - say, NW and NE quadrants, which should leave one of the southern quadrants open for your 'actual' drop. Heck, sometimes you just have to send in enough troops - say 15-18 units - to do damage in general until you can loosen up the defenders enough to make your 'real' drop. Sometimes that 'real' drop is to construct a landing pad, but often it's a raid to take out the shield generators or SALs under the city's shields, to make it easier to make a construction drop/drop ship landings later.

You'd be surprised how much faster are your shock troops than the enemy troops, especially if a road leads to the desired target. You can manually command individual units to move to certain areas of the map. Usually they'll take the fastest route there which includes the use of roads - so pay attention to the directions roads travel, especially if one leads from the edge of a city to key enemy defensive pieces like SALs. Clear the road's path with a feint if possible, then send in three or four more shock troops to try to sneak in and destroy soft targets near the road.

If this is blocked by an enemy fort or enemy units you may have to take direct control of the unit and command them to each 'way point' they need to use to circle around an enemy defense and knock out a SAL or something similar. Also, use command of individual units to get your troops to 'gang up' on the same enemy unit - sometimes if only one enemy militia unit stand between you and a SAL, you can destroy it before any help arrives to stop you. This also becomes important when you're trying to push the enemy off the squares adjacent to your drop ship. A word of warning: don't keep issuing the same command to a cohort over and over or it will never move, because this resets the unit's 'speed,' so to speak. One command once is good enough.

Last of all, DO NOT ENGAGE LEVEL 6, LEVEL 7, OR UGA REGULARS WITH SHOCK TROOPS any more than is necessary. These units will absolutely demolish your shock troops (they CAN hold their own once many of your legions are near 100% effectiveness, but this is still a good policy to follow). It is unfortunately necessary to sacrifice some shock troops in the interest of gaining time enough to build drop ship landing pads, but once the landing pad is built and warriors are unloaded from the first drop ship, WITHDRAW AS MANY SHOCK TROOP COHORTS AS YOU CAN! Do not let them engage the enemy, save them for future feints/raids on SALs/construction drops! Do this by selecting the individual cohort and selecting Withdraw amongst the red buttons at the very top of the screen (you only see these buttons when you select an individual cohort). You can also use the Group selection button to get several cohorts to withdraw at once.

Finally, don't try to attack too many cities at once. I find four is the most I can actually monitor at one time, but if I have to take the time to direct cohorts individually to their raid targets, even four is too much. Once I manage to land a drop ship's worth of warriors and the landing pad looks secure enough (meaning an enemy unit won't sneak around and kill the drop ship), I withdraw any shock troop cohorts in that city and move on to my next target selection, and trust that my warriors will handle things - they usually do. However, you do have to occasionally check back on mop-up operations to make sure a sneaky red militia unit didn't try to run all the way around your troops and take out your drop ship pad when they've moved away from it. I always have the drop ships leave the pad once auto-reinforce has turned off for that city, so if the enemy DOES sneak around, they only destroy an empty pad.

Most planets I conquer within about half the time allotted by Krellan HQ.

And as for the game crashing, there isn't really much I can tell you because even if you reload a save, usually the same crash happens at the same time. Still, you can try saving frequently and see if that helps. Also, I like to use File-Freeze to freeze time first before I save. I figure the less things actually going on when I save the more likely the save won't corrupt.

Though remember, even if an invasion crashes, start a new one! Sure, you'll get a score of 0 for the crashed invasion, but look on the bright side: with no promotion, your shock troops will have more time to build up their Battle Value against softer tech levels. And the sliding scale only counts the last 5 invasions, so if your next four score 99.8% (only twice have I ever scored 100.0%), you can still earn the promotion...