Why so many bots(AI)?

[Blackdog_kt]

This is not a fault of the game design, it's perfectly possible to fly online without any AI at all.

It's just a preference of the people running the server, trying to populate the map and create some action so people don't just fly around in that big map with nothing to shoot. Like others said before, i'm sure that when multiplayer is improved and the sim optimized even more, we'll have little use for AI because we'll be able to have 128 human players.

As it is now however the AI is needed to fill up the map...for example, if there's only 20 people flying around on the channel map, they could very well spent all their fuel without finding a single enemy aircraft to shoot at.