In Homeworld2, Relic designed the fighter production system to be more robust and resilient, so fighters were used more and could be effective even after taking casualties. So what you ended up with were people who massively swarm fighters and they are quite difficult to *Really* kill. Once a fighter wing's strength started to drop into low yellow or red it usually had 1-3 fighters left, so you had those break formation and return to repair and re-arm, and out flew a completely stocked fighter wing. Losing a few fighters didn't cost you anything.
This could apply to any future NS game like this: Instead of dropping a shotgun, you pay a cost and EVERYONE spawns with shotguns. Or you could assign a certain percentage of people spawning to get a shotgun versus any other weapon, or assign a certain IP to output only marines armed with shotguns. You wouldn't pay for each shotgun, just a set cost to spawn marines with shotguns.
Marines could appear in waves landing via dropships instead of spawning from IPs, so the alien objective would be to simply disable the landing beacon and kill all the marines alive to stop them from rebuilding one. The commander would be paying a price to land a wave with a certain mix of weapons instead of LMGs. Anything is really possible, and it's quite foolish to simply assume things will work the same.