That's a sad story.. DF 34.11 NPC's are definitely a lot more effective than those in the current version...
Can you post the save game?
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About the "unretire crash bug" it will be very hard to track down. It only showed up in our current game after we had over 30 adventurers, we were unable to trigger it from the last good save game, nor did we find any hint as to what caused it.
The bug report can be found here:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=6310Discussion in this very topic, can be found here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=104399.msg4171715#msg4171715We know Atomic Chicken likely ended his turn by retiring his adventurer (he at least survived). My guess would be that his adventurer somehow became corrupted, and that any attempt that tries to reload or view his adventurer will trigger a crash (such as opening load adventurer page with his name).
We know retired adventurers can become corrupted, Evictedsaint's adventurer had his character become completely corrupted upon retiring, any attempt to visit the village he retired in (an event that would lead to his adventurer being loaded) causes the game to crash, some discussion of that can be found here :
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=104399.msg4693521#msg4693521(in response to why his information couldn't be added to the list of achievements and deaths that Kesperan has made)
By that time obviously, we were already unable to unretire. We do not know if it would have triggered the unretire crash had it been a fresh game, but is seems likely. We also do not know where atomic chicken retired, so it is hard to test from our current game if his adventurer can be approached in adventure mode or causes a crash like Evictedsaint's.
The bug is thus likely triggered by some kind of save game corruption. Evictedsaints village now triggers the "failed to load nemesis unit" error, but I think that is a very general message that is not very informative.
We should probably have reverted to the last good save when the thing occured in our current game, and that might have allowed us to play bug free for a much longer time. Or it might not have.
Toady has fixed several save game corrupting bugs lately, but those might have been unrelated, or he might have caught it, but that would be hard to confirm, it is hard to proof a bug isn't there.