would a string error do the same thing???

it wasnt doing it this morning till i added in the pirate ship name and some more tech and advent names

there where 4 names for the tec and advent and 52 for the pirates......

probally is the queen anns revenge and the rising sun

it appears that every three times i start the game it works????? doesnt make much sense

Your error is popping up from the map that gets loaded for the menu background, it loads an actual game map, starting objects and all.  Hence the working occasionally, a map that precludes the offending object.

That's too indeterminate an error for someone to just tell you what it is.

We've had a couple of these issues pop up in the course of developing SGI and SOA2.  You can try the eclipse plugin and see if that catches them for you, otherwise start digging through assets you've changed.  Start with ones that are loaded by maps.  Pirates, resources, planets.

I'd guess it's the pirate names, you probably screwed up an index value on one of them.  If there's a bad number in there, or if there are just too many of them and it has a cow whenever it tries to read above a certain number, that would explain your frequent, but inconsistent error.  Not every name would be used every instance.

you need to backtrack your changes until you loose the error. I already stated that is probably your names. Too many pirate names, get rid of all of them (original file replacement) and if no more error then add 1 or 2 at a time until you get the error back. Then post back with how many name you can add without crashing.

Or its the length of the names. If you have some longs ones, get rid of them and test.

Backtrack, test. Backtrack test. Backtrack test. 

If that fails, start over and do more testing as you change files.