Balance Team Activity Reports - Q1 2026

[Haste]

Number of Active Balance devs this Quarter:
The Universal Discovery Freelancer Balance Dev Constant (1)

What have you done to advance your balance team’s goals this quarter?
Suggest to people they learn the tools of the trade, like MaxLancer, so we can increase our bus factor a little bit.

What are your balance team’s goals for the next quarter?
Not necessarily next quarter, as development teams for mods sometimes have to think a little longer-term than factions, but in no particular order:

• Do an initial rework of 5,000 cargo transports, focusing on making piracy encounters more fun for all involved parties. The "reinforced train", intended to function as the "civilian" 5k, is largely done as a testbed ship and sits on a git branch along with a bunch of new weapons.
  
• Do another pass of cruisers focusing on making them deliver on a satisfying power fantasy. At the moment, shield drain and toggling feels like a "punishment" mechanic, when originally it was intended as a defensive & offensive mode, with the offensive mode feeling very powerful and dangerous to face. In reality, of course, this didn't survive testing, as the numbers all had to be drastically toned down to make the class even remotely balanced.
  
• Do a component-focused battleship rework. We can likely avoid an insurmountable amount of workload by making the components have health equal to the ship root, and making them work like damage multipliers (or damage reducers) via armor mechanics. Destruction of these components would result in the death of the ship, avoiding the need for damage models, which are an insane amount of work to produce for all battleships in the game.
  
• Chew through the "ship models that are ready for implementation" backlog, which has some cool stuff in it like the Xeno Corvette.
  

What have you done to drive patches and promote high quality fixes this quarter?
Quite a lot of work on a non-Discovery project that, in theory, could result in cool & good additions and changes to Discovery. Or better yet, result in a cool & good mod for Freelancer for people to enjoy.

How would you like your Balance team develop moving forward?
Get one or more people with solid MaxLancer-fu to make projects like Battleship & Transport reworks much more viable.

What changes, votings, or info gathering have you done this quarter to promote this development?
https://codeberg.org/TheStarport/freelancer-retold/

Yw, I took this pretty seriously. A random sidenote: working on a volunteer project like this as a full-time job in addition to, you know, needing to work a job and live a normal life is something everyone needs an occasional break from.