I have to imagine 40+ ground units all in a concentrated area might be eating some CPU cycles during the latter part of the war. Any idea if it's possible to reduce some of them? Maybe make a "Light Ground War" mod?

We asked this years ago and a big NO was the result.

I'd rather like to have the ability to have more planes than grunts too

It's probably all integrated into the campaign manager in order to assign bombing targets, etc.

Could you please send me the details off your pilot, squadron/jasta, date etc so I could try this on my own computer.

1 April 1918 64 Royal Naval Air Squadron

I did give it a try and as an 1915/16 player; woow that period it is demanding voor your PC. As you can see the frametime graph on the right corner is peaking like hell and does even reach 60ms [=below 20FPS] While I never did see the capped 57FPS in the OSD. Normally I always fly 17.5ms [=57FPS] straight line in the afterburner OSD.

My settings are regional air activity --> highest settings, same max to the Encounters, woods/forest and the other hand was set to low. I will give it a for try regional air activity --> very low and Encounters --> historic, because I think it is also the amount of plane activity that is causing the drop. The setting for nVidia and ingame adjustments can be see in the shimmer trees topic.

The flight btw was immerse, out of ammo, engine was going out and plane was shot to pieces, luckily I could make an emergency landing while I did hit two trees, [btw trees without any shimmer ]

edit: I using lots of mods, like the triangle mod for high end machines V1.5, maybe I should go going for the medium V1.5?

Hi Hellshade, I did fly two #64 RFC/RAF campaigns using:
RW his adjustments
Antialiasing Mode to "Application Controlled"
Antialiasing Setting to "Application Controlled"
Antialiasing Transparency to "Off"
In the WOFF Workshop I set AA to 4x

Ingame settings
Regional air activity --> very low
Encounters --> historic
Trees/Forest—> low

All mods were disabled.
Vsync—> fast, for lowend players maybe set Vsync to adaptive half refresh rate.

My framerated is capped to 57FPS

I did fly two missions and now I do have a straight Frametime line. I can not test this anymore because I have been killed :-(

Think it worth to try and experiment further.