It might be fun if you could set down communal spawn points, flag poles or something. They would have to be within a certain distance from your base and can be destroyed by the enemy.

You'd be able to link one spawn point to a previous one, so you'd slowly spawn closer to the enemy base, but they'd only have to destroy one spawn point along your chain to make the rest useless, so you'd need to build a fort around each one and defend it.

As for easy changes:

- The escape key needs to bring up a menu with options and a quit confirmation instead of quitting instantly.

- The chat is difficult to read, blue in particular, coloured names and white text, or slightly tinted text would be better, as well as a chat history.

- Team colours might need a re-think, green are harder to see against grass, and blue chat I already mentioned.

- Invert the scroll wheel

- A no-build/destroy zone around the intelligence would stop tunnelling under it for cheap captures and also prevent completely filling the squares directly around it, yet allow a fortress to be built around it.

- Shovels could just be removed, pickaxes do the job.

- Don't remove head-shots.

- No vehicles please, nor rocket launchers, etc.

- Extend the respawn time

- Names above team-mates heads, but not in iron sights mode (they get in the way of aiming)

- Make the player marker thicker/more visible on the map

- Minimap on the HUD, indicators that point to the enemy intel so you always know which way you are facing.

I'd love to see this develop into a sturdy game with more than 2 factions and huge player numbers.

Just like Mr. Wrinkles said, This game is simple. And should stay that way. The only changes should be interface/anti hacking and griefing/ balancing/ terrain generation changes. Besides that no. I generally believe it is a great game. Perhaps more weapons IF they are balanced. NO SNIPERS OR ROCKETS OR VEHICLES THOUGH.

Also @Drury, That game was the best game of AOS ive ever had. Until the hackers showed up.

I don't think adding extra features will stop people hosting vanilla servers. Can't both parties enjoy the game?

If things like classes, weapons, game modes, etc. are added then hopefully the game will be a stage where there is a match options page where they can be turned off.

They won't be turned off. If those people want those things - they can go play the billions of games out there that have those bloody things . Why turn this into another Tf2 clone.

Also the pickaxe and spade should have the ability to deal melee damage.

I think we need more stable servers i can't even connect (i live in the netherlands)

Because I feel it is worth repeating...

Spades ought to only be capable of digging literal surface-features.
They should only be able to destroy the -initial- highest blocks of the map (i.e. "the surface"). They should not be able to plow through any other blocks, -including- blocks placed by players.

Pickaxes ought to function as they do now in that they can destroy any type of block, one at a time.
However, they ought to take longer to destroy any blocks placed by a player than ones generated with the map. Just make an additional value for a block [as placed by a player, or not], and if so increase the number of strikes required to break it by some multiple.

These previous two notions would bring balance to tunneling without adding or removing any additional elements to the game.
It increases the reward for investing in fortifications, while still having it remain possible to breach said fortifications, and still having it remain possible to tunnel as well.
As it stands the balance between time+effectiveness of tunneling vs. fortifying is immensely in favor of tunneling, and this would help bring them to a more equal level of influence.

In addition to these concepts, I'd like to add one more.
Bullets should not destroy any player-placed blocks.
It is very novel, I know, and there is fun to be had in shooting the legs off a guard tower.
But destroying defenses from afar should be a privilege reserved for something more explosive...such as mortars!
Right now it is too easily rewarding for attackers to be able to destroy structures with bullets.

Another suggestion, you could have a build mode at the start of a game where nobody is able to shoot, just build for the short duration. Like a preparation phase. Then when the timer ends the fighting can start.

- High quality bullet whizzing past noises, like from ARMA

- More diverse, highly specific host-controlled procedural generation