Maybe the Protection from Death has been fixed, I last observed the non-effect a week or two ago.

Thanks for answering all my questions!

One thing I could do to prevent the Spell of Making is make the Forge of the Overlord or the Spell of Making require 100 of each shard, which would never be attained, even in a Dense magic map of the largest size.

Yes, I saw those new settings, and except for Difficulty, I'm using the highest setting in each one.   I'm playing on Difficulty 2.5 with 4 opponents because the map is bigger than standard (you said Setting 5 or 6 would be a real challenge, however I like to build up my heroes with heaps of quests and monsters, and collect all my Quest and Event heroes, plus the Unlikely Heroes modmod I made, with No Experience Split and eventually go against the fully built up opponents, but so far the Spell of Making keeps coming up ).  In my latest game, I used the Ranger's "Web" ability to fix 8 out of 9 enemies in one battle I had, and my Bacco the Beggar with Enzo's Knife and almost full Champion Armor (which I bought from them before I DOWed, heheh) to mostly avoid the big-hitting Hammer units.  It will be even better when Enzo's Knife stacks properly!  And the one time I got hit by a 3 or 6 members remaining hammer unit, I took 70 damage but still had 20 remaining.  And I had Rachel and other healers to heal Bacco up throughout.  I won the battle without any losses apart from my unit that the Ranger (Mouse from Unlikely Heroes I made into a Ranger) summons at the start of every battle.  Even my Greater Demonshrill unit (5 members) made it through without dying.

Just wondering, do you have any idea why the Spell of Making is being cast in my games?  AFAIK there is no mod that would enable the Spell of Making if you have the pre-game option switched off.

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I've noticed in battle that the "cards" on the side that show character-turns/some spells still show the weapon bonus autocasts (which still have to be run through pre-battle).

Ah. Didn't notice (I haven't done much training in this game) that yet.

Also, will units you get from a quest (Panca/Wilbur's Archers, for example) be upgradable? Kodrin's Squires seem tobe upgradable, though I think they're the exception.

Well I verified the game cache and only 8 files needed to be reacquired, and there were 8 files in your .dxpack collection, so I don't think there was any corruption of my files.

Has anyone else found that the Spell of Making was still being cast when using XtraDeconstruct or other mods?

Otherwise I'll need to put it down to a quirk in the way all the new factions, other mod features etc. work.

There actually does not seem to be a coded shard requirement for the Forge of the Overlord or the Spell of Making, so I would say that is hard coded.  However I have a file in it which has (as you suggested):

<SpellDef InternalName="SpellOfMaking">
<AIData AIPersonality="AI_General">
<AIPriority>0</AIPriority>
<AITag>Victory</AITag>
</AIData>
</SpellDef>

That should work.

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It seems like the Ranger path compatibility download doesn't have the ranger files, but the paladin's files.

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