The Lord is more alive than dead

But the first battle with Robin is really difficult. For comparison: I recently completed MasteR's "Uninvited Guests" on Hero difficulty as Daleb, and all the battles there were easier.

Robin was conceived as a kind of mini-boss. If you remember, in the original, no Necromancer guests came to the northeastern part of the Elven territory, and this is a drawback, IMHO. It's like, develop, build up your army as much as you want - the enemy will wait. Therefore, this has been fixed here, and dragons-guardians of the Veil of Night conveniently appeared as a plot justification. As for MasteR, I never tried to outdo his maps, although they also inspired me.

And if you use SetHeroLootable(<hero name>, nil) to prevent the ring from dropping, will that message still appear?

Ideally, it shouldn't appear... But here's the thing: a monk (unlike a mummy or a dragon, for example) doesn't use the scripted deployment function before a battle, and the battle with him takes place when this hero is in reserve. SetHeroLootable simply won't work and will give an error, saying that the hero name is nil (because, in essence, he is not on the map, since there was no deployment). In general, there is such a mishmash of script tricks in my code (sometimes for similar events) that it is impossible to figure it out without a drink (but this is not for sure ). But what can you do - I was learning them from scratch back then, so to speak, on a "live" example.

Added 21 hours 7 minutes ago
Update to v1.2:
- one active hero has been added to the "blue" side, and two outposts with Dark Elf dwellings have been adapted for him – this is intended to slightly "revive" the gameplay in the underground, as the AI is not very active in hiring there (it is not necessary to defeat this hero; he will leave on his own after completing the task for Coldwell);
- Ossir's progression has been slightly changed;
- the "Crippling Strike" ability has been removed from forest archers;
- a bug has been fixed, where the computer opponent's first aid tent sometimes had double turns when it tried to heal an allied unit on which the player had previously cast "Subjugation";
- Faydaen has been weakened: "Empathy" has been removed, luck has been reduced by 2 points, and the magical resistance of troops has been reduced by 15%;
- Robin arrives for the first time two weeks later (as it was in v0.2), but the intervals between his arrivals, starting from the 2nd, have been reduced by one week;
- in the temple of magical touch (southwestern corner of the surface), you can now learn "Dispel";
- "Grief" in Nicholas's spellbook has been replaced with "Slow";
- the witch in the starting location always gives the Logistics skill (but not the skills from this "branch");
- other minor changes.

The topic header has also been changed (I am subtly reminding you of point 3 of the "Warnings" section in it). The download link is the same.