Of course you could try sneaking up to a base and get killed after a five minute walk. Often you could get revenge too, and usually you move in as a team and catch up to it after death with a quad to pick up your weapons.
Now there were "high-money" servers, where everyone could get a Comanche chopper or whatever - the game play wasn't made for this and it resulted in a spawn-kill-fest.
Actually I've felt no spam of any sorts when playing on properly setup servers, except on purposely small-scaled fun-matches with 32 players with shotguns, where grenade spamming would occur.
Almost all maps are so big, that there can't be spawn raping etc., except sometimes when a base was about to fall into enemy hands.
I think the devs threw the high-money option out now anyway. It's more fun when team-play is required if you want to win, since you can only buy heavy armour using a collectively earned team budget. Only with luck can you earn yourself a bigger tank.
edit: I think it failed mainly because it was a pile of bugs, when it came out. I played the demo for a while when it came out, but then forgot about it for about four years and bought it, and many bugs where patched out. The developer filed for bankruptcy because Jowood didn't pay them to do the patches I think.
Then they hired another group of fans and programmers to do a sequel, but unfortunately it got cancelled. I guess it wasn't platform compatible enough with the Gameboy Colour (lack of RAM).