When we operate at company levels the platoons are usually within a kilometer of each other for mutual support. The issue we ran into that led me to ask some of these questions, is we encountered ALIVE active units in the early parts of the mission, but when we got closer to one of the town objectives and the CQB/civilian AI kicked in, the active units would not unprofile despite the low numbers of on-server AI.
In regards to DAC, I was personally getting tired of the formulaic nature of missions designed with DAC, and the test time required for the literal dozens of triggers needed, especially for caching/uncaching different AOs. ALIVE streamlines that beautifully, and when we've had platoon scale engagements performance has been much better. Our only real issue has been threading between two major AOs, activating all of them because our group limiter is set higher than it should, and crashing the server.
DAC AI sometimes perform better at the individual group level, especially when connected with a headless client and ASR AI, but each group acts independently and can get in each other's way. With ALIVE, the individual fire teams are at times easier to deal with, but we have gotten the sense we are fighting a consolidated enemy presence. It's an interesting change, and one I think is for the better. Once I figure things out, of course. Despite my mistakes, ALIVE has been much easier to pick up for our new editors, mostly due to the fantastic documentation and support, whereas DAC utilizes rough German translations several years out of date.
Thanks for the answers gents, I'll see what I can do in a new mission.