Title of Error msg box was something like CycleOrders.
Error 3421 Type conversion error
Happened when I started another 30day increment. At first the turn was just really slow. Slow enough I got up and did other stuff. When I came back, this error was on the screen. And it got stuck there in that even when you cleared the dialog it came back. And back, and back. I ended up just hitting the ENTER key as fast as I could, and doing so until one hand got tired then I switched to the other, and back, and back etc. Never could get past it. Must have been hundreds if not thousands of them, as I was clearing them before they could even draw on the screen. Finally nuked the game and told it to END TASK.
This is in 5.55
I've had this happen several times to me (it's the reason I thought my game was completely busted and mailed it to you Steve) it has happened some more times since then, and I think that I have pinned down why it's happening.
It seems to be caused by orders which are completed very quickly being set to Cycle. I think this is so because after I kill the task (as I have had to do as well) if I come back and look at the task groups, many of the ones set to Cycle orders have been bugged. They are no longer set to Cycle order, and instead of their orders (often lots and lots and lots of orders) in their order list as if I had put a large number in the repeat orders box and clicked it.
While all this occurs some orders seem to be skipped, some of my freighters and colony ships are in the middle of carrying out Unload orders even though they never loaded that cargo, for example. I also get similar failures from my civies for a couple increments afterward (Failed to unload colonist and the like).
What I was doing that I believe set this off was set up my luxury liners. As fluff I had designed a small luxury liner that was pretty fast and had a lot of Cargo Handling systems. I had built one of them for each colony and they were locked in a Cycle of (for example):
Load Colonists: Earth
Unload Colonists: Mars
Load Colonists: Mars
Unload Colonists: Earth
Refuel at Colony: Earth
The idea was that these guys did no net change to the population, so I didn't have to worry about over crowding, and then they were fluffed as dedicated liners for government personnel and property. I instantaneously transferred all of the officers and whatnot to and from planets hooked up to this network at whim, only actually using shuttles and whatnot for other bodies. The Earth to Mars version took three days to do this run at the very least, and often less. The Earth-Luna one was accomplishing this more than four times a day, loading unloading time included, and the game didn't like that one bit.
After a couple of these failures I thought that the unloading/loading may be the troublesome part, so I removed all those orders so that it was just
Move To: Mars
Refuel at Colony: Earth
and the game liked that even less, failing again almost immediately, I'm guessing because now there were many, many more orders being generated for that Earth-Luna liner.
After that point I just left all the liners at Earth, and I haven't had the problem since. I do like the idea though, so maybe I will set them back up with a three day delay in between runs or something like that.