Thats pretty much what I'm doing right now.
I got a new copy of renegade on origin and I'm checking the map out ingame.
By now I think its better take the original as an guide but to rebuild it 1:1. There are a lot of little things that can be done better than the original. Not the best but the fastest example I can come up with is: in original CNC-Siege the GDI PP and Ref are so close, you can easily place a nuke between and send them to hell.
If you watch my tutorial you can get the map in udk and remake it (then you know where to put stuff in)
-H4MPB6DVdc
I will put a file with the scale size I use when I'm re-making a map