TLDR - use real money to create a full military, of many countries, and use EVE Online's "Corporations" aspect to club people together into armies, mining ores that can be traded for things you would/could otherwise buy with real money, like how you buy ships in Star Citizen, or Gold Lions in War Thunder. But have a risk also to your vehicle, if it is destroyed (perhaps you get a few chances) you must purchase another for an affordable price or use ore you've mined, and create a balance
A while back I posted (as did others) to the effect of a world scale Mil-Sim, ArmA meets DCS World, meets an MMO on a full scale, like just about all the vehicles a countries military may have all modelled in at sim (or close to) level.. However scale was obviously the issue.
Outerra, would you say is a giant frontier, yes? A huge world filled with possibility, but so much so, that it's hard to pull it all together into a cohesive gameplay time, that wouldn't take (best case scenario) an entire day to find an enemy and engage him, probably using at least a fast aircraft of some kind.
So I thought about the game "Second Life" a woman on there became the first virtual landlord to make over $1 Million through selling virtual land, and that got me thinking about an aspect we are already doing- Microtransactions.
A good frontier needs that one thing, promise, to make it worth travelling through. Create actual financial benefit, make the land have actual ores that can be mined and traded in for vehicles/ammo/weaponry that otherwise cost real money in game to purchase.
"Star Citizen" has you purchasing your single starship of choice for sometimes hundereds of dollars(about that right?) make some high level vehicles like aircraft carriers, advanced jets and other weaponry cost real money to buy and use, and if you destroy another persons you get financial credit for it, but does that bring about gambling laws?
Take a scenario of gameplay as an example here, you decide with your Corporation (army) to build a base and start mining an area where a prospecting vehicle of some kind has discovered, lets say Oil. You mine away, all the time fortifying your base and creating a fighter patrol and ground unit defense. Your base will now have a "radio noise" signature that can be detected by enemy AWACS patrols etc.
Navy? You build merchant ships to carry your ores and you must defend them with destroyers etc and escorts, but perhaps a group of people have bought a submarine and all they do is patrol for such things. If they destroy the merchants they receive the credit to the amount that it was carrying. (things like merchants can be AI of course if needed)
I wondered if it could be set in the late 40's to 50's, maybe early 60's era of technology so as to not be too advanced to where weapons systems take the players skill out of the game.
On the question of modding- to sim level, almost an entire armys vehicles and weaponry, that is where Star Citizen comes in again, they held a competition for a modding team to build starships for players to individually purchase, then they would then vet the creations to make sure they were balanced etc. The game here would create an economy where many modders can build a single vehicle and receive a portion of the profits. The development team could perhaps create a blueprint of what parameters the modding team that won the contract would have to meet.
It could go all the way down to simple skins made by an outside modder(s), vetted as realistic by the development team then made available for purchase on the main website, thus giving the original artist exposure and reward for the effort.
See what you think.