I can confirm at least one precise workaround:- On opening the Ground Forces window for the first time after loading the game, creating a series will fail twice.
- It will succeed on the third try.
- Creating another series will fail, then succeed.
- Once again, creating another series will fail, then succeed.
- Creating additional series will succeed, even after closing and re-opening the Ground Forces window.
The name of the series does not seem to matter, i.e. it does not matter if you create a series with the same or a different name.
EDIT: I had previously mis-identified effects in the ground forces window as being the source of the problem, this was incorrect and I've deleted that from my post.
You seem to have pinned the problem down. I just probed the matter very quickly once more and had to go through about two dozen failed attempts. After my previous post, I had many unit series, several of them empty. Did you have two pre-existing unit series? If so, the number of failures seems to depend on the number of unit series you already have. Presumably some incrementing index that starts over (after every restart of Aurora?) when it shouldn't.
I did this testing on an existing "real" save where I had around 15-20 series already. However, I do recall that some people have had bigger problems.
However, you've given me an idea...
...okay, I checked in my database and I found the following:
1 Series L Light Rifle 40 224
2 Series M Infantry Rifle 40 224
4 Series 1 Heavy Machine Gun 40 224
6 Series 3 Anti-Tank Rocket Launcher 40 224
40 Series SM-10 Marine Rifle 40 224
42 Series SM-11 Marine Heavy Machine Gun 40 224
48 Series SM-17S Marine Munitions 40 224
50 Series SM-19A Marine Company Command 40 224
58 Series 21 Armored Personnel Carrier 40 224
63 Series 23M SP Anti-Tank Gun 40 224
65 Series 24M SP Artillery Gun 40 224
67 Series 25M SP Anti-Air Gun 40 224
69 Series 27 Munitions Transport Vehicle 40 224
70 Series 29A Company Command Vehicle 40 224
71 Series 29B Battalion Command Vehicle 40 224
84 Series 33M Medium Tank 40 224
188 Series 71 Machine Gun Pillbox 40 224
191 Series 73M Anti-Tank Bunker 40 224
194 Series 74M Fortress Artillery 40 224
198 Series 75M Anti-Air Gun Emplacement 40 224
201 Series 79-B Fortified Command Post 40 224
Notice that the series ID numbers which are here match the numbers of the tries which failed to create new series in my tests - Try #1 failed, try #2 failed, try #3 (not listed) succeeded...and so on. So the hypothesis here would be that the series ID is not checked on loading a new game, and is incremented with each series one creates or attempts to create and only succeeds if the series ID is not used. This would explain why other people have many more repeated failures until they can create a new series - in my case the gaps between series IDs are due to my poking around in the DB to implement the previously-mentioned workaround (and also a couple of other points I'll note below).
To test this I booted up the same game and created 40+ series to reach the next used ID# after 6. Someone owes me a beer for this... Anyways, it pans out; I was able to create every series from #7 through #39, failed on #40, created #41, failed on #42, succeeded on #43.
So the behavior is definitely that game does
not check the most recent or highest series ID on game load, starts incrementing series IDs from 1, and increments every time regardless of success or failure, only succeeding if a vacant series ID# exists.
I don't presume to know anything about Steve's code, but my suggestion for a hotfix would be to have the code for failing to create a series (which currently throws the Function #3353 error) increment the series ID repeatedly if series creation fails until an empty ID is found. Obviously this is a cheap hotfix but if the actual problem is subtle and difficult this would hopefully restore functionality in the meantime.
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Notes:The reason for my rather...sparse series ID spread in the DB is because I developed an ID numbering system to try and keep series ordered when I add new ones via the DB (referencing the earlier workaround posted in this thread). However, this did not work as the game does not sort the series list by ID#, the order is simply the order they are listed in the DB which is simply the chronological order of record creation. To get these sorted I this had to cut, create, and paste back my series to get the ID# order to match the chronological order. I'm not sure if this is intentional.
Additionally, I reiterate an earlier comment - there is currently no way in-game to remove a series, as the "Delete Series" button only clears the list of elements from a series. The only workaround for this is a DB edit, again.
To sum up, the series system in general needs some TLC to touch up the functionality so it all actually works as intended.
