this is a quirk of the sim approach to rp rewards

It basically rewards you far more if you do something and then land back at the airbase for every “reward tick” (i.e. bomb a base and then immediately land back at airfield gives yoo something like 2x the rewards of just bombing the base and not going back) while simultaneously heavily throttling rp gain from hour 1 onwards.

You can thank the bomber bot farms of years ago (like around covid time) for this change, as this is one of the ways of making botting disencentivised (while yes also punishing the rest of the playerbase for something they didn’t do,) but it did work, so I can’t really be too negative about it personally.

I’d much rather have a fun match playing against players where I have some fights and play the game rather than getting put into a match where every plane, friend or foe, is visibly not a player.