any word on a Dark Avatar patch

There's no question that one's forthcoming, although they've (perhaps wisely) not put a date to it yet. For what it's worth, tech supports response to a bug I reported was "just fixed this, it'll be in the next update."

I'm itching for it too, but I also want them to fix/add as much as possible with it so I'm content to be somewhat patient.

I'm not sure what "the same problems" are that other people are reporting is.

But 1.51 is in development. Or put another way, there's ALWAYS another update in development (at least for a long time after release).

Is there any chance that we'll see additional modding support in the next (few) patches? I know you guys were too busy on Dark Avatar to get to all the modding requests, but now that it's out of the way... I was kinda hoping some of the modding suggestions would manage to squeeze in there.

I would imagine the poster is referring to the performance issues a lot of people have posted about, whereby DA is a lot slower/choppier than DL was. I'm not sure whether this is one issue, lots of little issues, or simply a hit to performance as a result of graphics upgrades, but I certainly have my fingers crossed that a patch will help out as its unfortunately making the game unplayable for me at the moment.

From what I've seen/read I think it had to do with the graphic improvements, but some cards with low RAM and/or that are older have issues. Mostly ATI, but I could be wrong.

Edit:

Whoops, decided against a thread hijack.

disregard

I know that several people have reported that improving a planet (like using soil enrichment) adds more usable tiles to a planet but does not raise the planet quality. This may be one of the "same problems" that the OP was referring to - although, maybe this particular issue isn't a bug and is by design, I don't know.   

starchild: I saw that several players were having slowdown issues on Duel-Core + ATI machines that were solved with an update of the video driver. Is this similar to your setup?

The similar issues I were talking about was a persistant lock up and resulting crash that originated from trying to negotiate with a minor race in the trade screen. I have read several peoples description of this crash and it exactly similar to the crash i am having. before I went back to dread lords I also had a random crash, (actually these are lock ups that I have to open task manager for and end the task as DA stops responding). I do not remember the circumstances of the crash, but after 4 lock ups from the minor race trade screen, I stopped playing. My system specs are:
Dell XPS 400
Pentium 4 dual core 2.89 ghz
1 gig RAM
250 gig hard drive
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS PCI express 256 MB

PS....Dread Lords runs smooth as silk

Could you email me (scott@stardock.com) a saved game with this monor race you were trying to trade with? Also, can you post your most recient debug.err file for us to browse through....it may give more insight as to what the problem may be.

Thanks!