Most recently, I took my adventurer (who started as a peasant but has since slain a roc, minotaur, brush titan, and bronze colossus, along with many criminals/bandits), wielding a ☼steel short sword☼, and her band of 11 warriors to assault a Dark Fortress and rescue some prisoners, one of which was the cousin of my very first recruit. ...After my first foray into the place, I found that the despawning ally bug was in full effect, and after my team scattered, I never saw any of them again - I will admit I savescummed at this point, because fuck that. For the sake of lag reduction and not having my army scatter and then despawn, I melted all the goblins, as they were posing very minimal threat anyways and the team was butchering them en masse.
By default, the game has no name for melted flesh, because it has no melting point normally.
As I approached the central tower, my game suddenly slowed to a painful crawl. When I finally got there, I used my adventurer's species ability to sense creatures through walls to examine the tower, and quickly found the cause, much to my dismay.
Not pictured: a third floor with a cluster of similar magnitude to the second floor. Remember, this is without goblins, as I melted them all - this was strictly trolls, beak dogs, the occasional assimilated species, and the prisoners. (The white letters are my custom race, the rest are whatever else.)
I still struggle to remember which stairway is up and which is down, so I accidentally went upwards in the tower at first. On my way back down, I was attacked at the top of the stairwell, and leaped to the side to avoid a troll's attack. Unfortunately, this caused me to plummet 3 z-levels and hit the ground spectacularly hard.
I passed out on impact (for good reason), and slipped in and out of consciousness some 7 or 8 times before waking up. Because of the obscene amount of lag, this process took, I kid you not, nearly 10 minutes. If you've ever had your adventurer fall unconscious and seen how quickly turns normally progress during that time, this should stand out as patently stupid to you.
Luckily I had a crutch on hand (plus a spare STANCE body part connected to the brain, simulating telekinesis). Unfortunately, I had zero crutch walking skill, so my upright movement was actually
slower than my crawling movement, and both of them were slow enough to make every step take at least 20 seconds to process.
Some 50-ish troll/beak-dog kills and one dead rescuee (out of 34 total at the end) later, I got fed up with the lag and melted trolls and beak dogs too, because I was pissed at that point and just wanted to leave.
I walked out with this trailing behind me. It made moving kind of a nightmare. On the bright side, once I got out of the fortress and fast traveled, my legs magically healed themselves completely (seriously, Toady really needs to fix the healing in adventure mode, it's currently busted as fuck).
You can imagine my horror when, after I got to town and started asking the kids where they were from, I found out that kids telling you their mother's name and location did not actually allow you to ask directions to either of them, leaving me with 33 kids and no clue where to take most of them.
And that's where I currently stand. Honestly, it may be more trouble than it's worth to even continue this particular adventure.