I never undertand this argue: " I must retreat to base to get my weapons"
Yes..u must retreat to get them...but what do u want tell us? That ur squad wouldnt else need back to base in the next 1-2 minutes. Than u maybe play false/right / vs an AFK player...
In higher levels of play there's an advanced maneuver called a "soft retreat" this was very heavy in the EFA days where retreat was punished by lost map control (days before forward retreat points) anyways, this is done by pulling your troops away from combat but not the the base sector so that they can rapidly respond to the front if they need to. Usf can do this very well and very early if they chose by means of the ambulance. By doing this the USF can keep an incredible amount of pressure at the risk of losing the ambulance of course. Retreats do still happen, but less so by means of keeping their units at peak performance. The USF is actually arguably the best suited for this kind of gameplay due to the mobility of the ambulance and that it allows for heals as well as reinforcement (other factions generally need a combination of units or structures to attain this and with structures being immobile it creates a less flexible but harder point to fall back to.)
Retreatimg to acquire a weapon is a drawback in the same way that retreating to buold a base is a drawback for EFA. You are paying upkeep on a unit that might well be fully combat capable but is instead in the base sector. Additionally what if when you retreated and healed up you were 10 mu away from having the 60mu for the BAR? do you sit and wait? You can't upgun on the way to the front can you? Nope. You wait it out or don't get the gun and have to wait until next retreat. Sometimes even needing friendly territory is a pain in the ass if you are capping when you get the munitions for the upgrade. You have to wait and cap THEN upgrade and wait for it to process... There is 0 ways to spin "picking it up in the base is way better than getting it literally anywhere on the map from your base to the enemy's base" the only faction that can really make true advantage of "you pick it immediately instead of having to wait for the upgrade" realistically is UKF since they can drop weapons with the halftrack or out of the bins on the forward assembly allowing them to actually immediately arm on the front instead of trading an upgrade time for a walking from and then back to the front time.