The problem with the current game is that it is totally focused around capturing towers and facilities. Towers and facilities are easy to defend (especially with third person corner camping) and its much easier to simply wait for the enemy to come to you if you are on the back foot. This also makes tactical sense when anyone can simply jump in air cav and bypass the entire outdoor fight.
Outdoor fights typically happen when the balance of power is near even and as such are now a rare thing, often the nearest situation is when one stronger empire is besieging a facility.
The balance of power is decided by among other things:
- numbers
- respawn time
- vehicle timers
- tech benefit
- time to nearest base/AMS/Lodestar
See
Malorn's PS Manifesto for more details on this, Chapter 3.
In PS2 there must be ways to adjust this balance of power so that there is more reason to fight away from bases.
As you say I have done a fair bit of work on this, with the pertinent additions being:
- Lodestar acts as a vehicle bay
- Heavy AMS able to supply MAX armour
- Commanders able to deploy rearm terminals (standard AMS terminals)
- Engineers able to construct fortifications (as per Hayoo's designs)
- Heavy Field Turrets (equipped with tank sized weaponry)
- New common pool none tech benefit medium tank
- NTU fuel required to spawn at AMSs, vehicles at Lodestars, etc.
- Medics able to deploy simple, uncloaked respawn points
- Support role AMS variants (hacking, medical, engineer and command)
- More towers introduced, of various different kinds.
- Civilian buildings around the landscape, which can be quickly captured in a similar way to battlefield games capture points.
- More infantry cover outdoors; becomes harder for vehicles to roll through any landscape.
- Naval units introduced, powerful vehicles which can act as spawn points and strong points away from the towers and bases.
Check out my upgrade project for details of any of these.