- Yes, for both AI ground units and aircraft
- Yes, for only AI ground units
- No
I propose making the AI ground targets on Air RB maps immune to damage from one another. This is because matches regularly end within 10-15 minutes due to AI rapidly destroying each other without player interaction. This entirely prevents any kind of long-term strategy (which disproportionately impacts vehicles like the P-51 and Fw-190 that rely on speed as opposed to raw climb speed and turn rate). This is also generally just frustrating for both sides, as the match is ended without player input on either team. Automatic ticket bleed will often interrupt dogfights or prevent what could be a turn of tides in the battle. Ticket loss should be a result of player action, not AI.
Seeing as attackers usually have several minutes uncontested to engage targets in the centre of the map before fighters arrive, and due to the imbalance in A2G capabilities of different attackers, a smaller deviation in the number of ground units destroyed at the start of the match before fighters are able to intervene can quickly snowball into a far larger disparity in tickets through no further player interaction, and often makes these games unrecoverable if even one enemy simply runs away or hides around the airfield for a few minutes to prevent their team from wiping out and losing.
The volume of ground targets is just so large that to destroy all the howitzers and machine guns that damage each other would be extremely difficult if not impossible in the given time frame, and would itself likely win the game based on ticket depletion.
There is an argument to be made that AI air targets should be allowed to damage ground units, as their altitude means that attacking them incurs much less of an energy loss and inconvenience. They also take less ammunition to destroy and don’t ever require air-to-ground ordnance to destroy (unlike heavy pillboxes and tanks, or even light pillboxes with low calibre guns). There are also far less AI aircraft than ground units, which makes it easier to destroy them and prevent further ticket bleed.
Therefore I propose two solutions:
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Prevent both AI ground targets and aircraft from being able to destroy one another, to prevent any ticket bleed as a result of solely AI action. All ticket bleed is caused by players destroying ground and air AI targets, players, and bombing points.
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Prevent exclusively AI ground targets from being able to destroy one another. AI air units can still destroy ground targets and need to be eliminated to prevent further automatic ticket bleed.