1.8 -- "Fleet has no trade ships" ?????

Looks like you might have selected a destination for your survey ship that turned out to be a habited planet.

Since your survey ship has no weapons the game is responding by saying you have no trade ship so you cannot go there.

I really don't think so, but it sounds like as good a guess as any. I do not let my survey ships travel that freely. If the same might be true for colony ships, then perhaps that is what is happening, but, let's face it, such a message for such an occurrence, regardless of the ship class, goes beyond confusing. Worse, I had no indication what so ever of the location of the problem, or the name of the ship involved, hence, no clue what so ever to help me figure out what to do about what ever the problem may have been.

Just in case anyone is wondering, I am calling this a BUG, hence my reporting it via a ticket.

I am also guessing that any ship involved in this problem would have stopped moving and I would have seen it when I went through the inactive ships during my next turn. I did see a colony ship that was inactive, but was a long ways from its previously assigned target destination (a planet which had become colonized by another civ).

Well i have never seen this problem, but similarly, i do sometimes get messages that my ship cannot survey because it dousn't have a survey module, and then i have no idea which ship or where?? lol But who cares!

Also sometimes my colony ship will try to colonize a dead planet and i get a message for that too..... this is significant for you because the issue stems from being able to select a location in fog of war and you don't know there is a planet there and your ship tried to go there and that's what generated the silly message.

Oh yea, i cannot confirm this, but i bet the silly 'cannot survey' message is also a result from me or automation selecting a location in fog of war and not knowing an anomaly is there?

I opened a ticket for this problem a long time ago, and reported it in this thead.

That thread is now locked.

The problem as I reported it was caused by my colonizer, on autopilot to a colonizable world, arriving there only to find that it had been beaten there by an AI.  It had nothing to do with trade ships, and the message was therefore doubly misleading.  If this is the same thing you're seeing, then apparently the bug was never fixed.

You have a Survey ship shown as selected behind the message.  So, it is correctly telling you that the Survey ship cannot establish a trade route.  It is a M0 Survey ship, so it might be the result of an Anomaly.  You may have misidentified/misdirected the Survey ship when you got it from the Anomaly.  But the ship is definitely identified as a Survey ship.

Erischild: The last ship selected during your turn remains selected through End Of Turn processing, so you cannot count on the message to refer to the ship shown as selected.

This will often happen if you accented send a not trade ship to a foreign planet. However if you see it when this is not the case, please load the last auto save, and see if it happens again. If so, please send us the save. We have not been able to find any other reason this should happen, so any reproducible case would be very helpful. 

Mormegil, thanks for your response.

I no longer have a saved game prior to this happening. I will watch for it and preserve it the next time I see it.

However, this message is still useless unless it gives more information, such as a ship or fleet name or a planet name.