There are several major changes between BA and SA and knowing them will prevent you from failing real bad at the begining.

Fire through friendly - All turrets and units fire through friendly units and turrets(friendly means your own).
Solars cost energy - this means you cannot start making a solar when you have no energy,you need to plan a head a bit.
If you start on a spot with very close by Metal spots like on DSD for example,your Build Order should be Solar,mex, walk to second metal spot than solar,mex,mex lab.
the lab itself needs only 1-2 solars to be built without you stalling energy.
If the metal spots are further apart,like on Comet Catcher Start mex,walk to second metal spot,solar,mex,walk to third point,mex,solar,lab.
Commanders are tougher - commanders take more time to kill but they can be Emped and can be gunned down by roughly 7 T1 gunships,even less with good micro.
Commander wreckage - Commanders leave a 500 Metal Wreckage when they die as oppose to 2500 in BA.
AA/land weapons - Missile turrets/floating missile turrets/T1 AA kbots and T1 AA trucks can all fire on ground targets.
LLT - the LLT is more expensive than in BA and costs roughly 250 Metal,it is also heavier and deals a lot more damage.
Air - air units are tougher,fighters deal good DMG to land units but die very fast to AA,gunships are more resistant to AA and bombers can drop loads of bombs with very little space apart.
In General - there are also many small changes in the stats of all units.
Some units might perform a bit different and there are some extra units.
All of these you will have to experiment with for yourself as you play and are beyond the scope of this small guide.

So, taking a leaf out of XTA?

No,Samsons and slashers are not as effective as in XTA.

Sounds weird that gunships are more resistant to AA than fighters. At least it should be harder to hit a fighter with AA than a gunship.

Games has their own infrangible logic within their own frame. It's for the gameplay.

If anyone wants to take SA dev...plz do.

the last thing i wanted to do i reduce BT of guardians by 10%.
Of course to make SA work with this spring version you need to add a lua startscript but its in all the mods so you can just take it form there.

I cant even test it myself since i have tried 4 different ati drivers and my spring crashes with each one.

Tried 10.8 yet? It fixed it for me, though I found if I turned 3d trees off, it crashes as well in 0.82.4.

What error are you getting?