I'm interested in helping you guys with balance work and adding polish and intuitiveness to the numbers behind the classes. I've looked through troops.txt with the Barracks editor, and found many things that I think would be better changed. Why, for example, does the Elven_Assassin have 160 archery, and the rest of the Elves in the Elves faction only have 60? The same thing is wrong with the other weapon proficiencies in the Elvish faction. Why does the Elvish_Warrior of the Middle earth faction have 180 archery, more even than the Elvish_Assassin of the Elves faction? It's not intuitive that the strongest playable elf would not even be in the faction called Elves. I'd like to fix these kind of problems.
I'd also like to clean up some of the factions some. Gondor, for example, has the Ithilien_Ranger class right next to the Elite_Ithilien_Ranger class. The classes get nearly identical items, but the Elite version gets (slightly) better items. Their stats are also very similar, but the Elite version is strictly better. Why would anyone pick the non-Elite version? Why does it even exist? I'd like to either purge classes like these, or give them distinct roles that give players a reason to choose them.
I'd also like to tackle items. Right now there are quite a few items that sadly are almost never used, because their stats are inferior to other items that players could pick. This results in quite a few excellent models and textures being completely unused. I'd like help fix this problem by seperating armor into a few consistent cost/effectiveness tiers for each faction, so that for a given amount of money, a player has access to up to a certain tier of armor for the class he chose, and all armors within that tier are equally effective so that he can make his decision based purely on style. I'd also like to fix a few edge cases like that of the headless, naked Legolas. Right now Legolas is the best archer on The Middle Earth Faction, so he is often picked. However, players can rarely afford both his bow/arrows/sword/swordshield and his armor, and so they settle with his weapons, helmet and boots. This results in them wearing an invisible helmet and invisible boots without wearing the full-body Legolas armor, so they are naked and headless, which looks incredibly dumb. I would solve this problem by first reducing the cost of the Legolas Armor Set, so that players can always afford the full set. Then, depending on whether you want players to able to afford Legolas purely with the 10,000 starting gold or not, I would increase the cost of sword and shield to put the cost of the full set over 10,000, or not.
While I'm not experienced with Mount and Blade's module system, I do have some programming experience, and I should be able to learn how to do the relatively simple task of balancing numbers with it quickly. I'd love to help you guys polish your mod, and make it a universally fun and intuitive experience for the player.