Wouldn't it be best to bake the AO into the color map? That is what I have been doing for my models.

Thats actually more limiting. If you want to remove ao you then have to rebake. Also makes it easier to tweak albedo and ao separetely.

I guess I will keep those maps separate then. In the game asset creation course he bakes the AO into the color master so hew will have only 3 maps instead of 4.