I'm the author, and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote - NS was special and trying to preserve that specialness was why I put the buildings into Combat in the first place. I miss that era of experimentation both in mods and commercial releases. I would've loved to be online during the heyday of Tribes 2 or Planetside.
Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.
Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.
Fate was probably determined at the point that combat came out, xmenu just accelerated it with absurd upgrades that let one person steamroll the server (though it was sometimes fun to be that one person, it wasn't for the other half of the server...)
At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.
Both of planetside and tribes were amazing. This was really before the age of competitive gaming so it was actually fun to play and not just another day job
Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.
Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.