NPC Balance

[Grail Quest]

I feel that a lot of mod-makers out there do not understand what nanos and shield batteries are really for.
For convenience, let's call them (healing) potions.

If, as a matter of course, player characters are meant to carry them -- if a game starts and they are assigned a handful of them as default gear -- then the message being conveyed by the game designers is: This is not meant to be a realistic game. You will face what would normally be impossible odds, and as part of the "excitement" and "heroism" factor of the game, can expect to pull through.
Look at the SP campaign, mission 4. Just you and Juni, and a swarm of heavy fighters, plus capital ships. Incidentally, notice that the capital ship guns were carefully designed to not obliterate you with a single hit. Again, the framework of Freelancer is you playing a character doing heroic things. Things you see on TV and movies. Challenging things, but elevated to a romanticized, heroic, level.

So where do potions come in? Well, they let the character have the same gear as the NPCs, and yet survive those heroic scenarios. They necessarily have a game presence so that the player can buy them for their PCs, but otherwise, they really "do not exist". And certainly, within the game, they illogically should not exist in the potion form. I mean, if you can pop a shield battery to restore your shields, why not just design a better engine, or one with a bigger fuel reservoir, to power your shield? And why can batteries instantly restore your shields while your engine can't?
Potions are an explicit cheat, for the PC "only", and recognized as that type of artifact in game design everywhere.

Another use of potions is to extend the useful mission duration. Instead of running back to base for repairs every ten real-time minutes of gameplay, you can use (and collect) potions in the field. This allows useful, non-tedious, gameplay to continue and alleviates a lot of logistics for players.
Again, potions are an explicit cheat to allow this.

Because potions are a cheat for PCs, you will very rarely see NPCs in any game using them. Or if they do, the will do so very sparingly, even if their resources would allow them to have more. This, I believe, is because game designers understand that keeping the game action flowing is part of the game experience. Therefore, unimportant encounters will not be life-or-death situations, but just popcorn to keep things lively.

*

In Discovery (and other mods), giving too much of anything to the NPCs is a horrible mistake. For example, in the TNG mod, Xenos have mines. A *lot* of mines. And they drop them like pepper from a shaker. And he mod makes mines much more effective. As a result, even on a difficulty 1 mission, you can spend a half hour getting knocked about by mines and be able to do nothing about it, nor make any headway in the mission. It's ridiculous.

Similarly, in Discovery, giving NPCs a lot of potions simply extends combat to tedious levels. It makes combat "challenging" by virtue of prolonging it. As a side effect, it wastes my time. If I want a combat-intensive game, I can just attack wings flying about or take more missions and more difficult missions. I do not want to spend a half hour crawling through one small mission.

What is the design goal that resulted in giving NPCs potions? Is it to prolong combat? If so, yes, but the original goal is flawed, IMO. Is it to make combat more exciting? You can instead reduce the number of potions that PCs can carry, thus heightening the risks involved in getting into combat, without unnecessarily extending the actual duration of combat.
At that same time, recognize also that by reducing the potion allowance (or giving potions to random encounters), you are also reducing useful flight time. How does that enhance gameplay? Or are players running to the nearest friendly dock for repairs all the time?