Some other things to consider...
Groups are going to be controlled by a leader so while you have to make decisions for every "leader", their troops will do what the leader tells them to do. So for arguments sake, if you had 50 NPCs, 10 of them are probably group/team leaders so you're only making 10 decisions rather than 50!
And then if it comes to combat, rather than work out actions for each individual NPC, decide what the group leader orders them to do and then have the whole group do that.
If it comes to opening fire, have all the small arms fire as a group and decide a percentage chance that the group might hit the PCs. Roll your percentile dice just once per group action rather than make the Small Arms check for each individual NPC. This saves a lot of dice rolling!
Sometimes you just have to tell the players to "think" before accepting a challenging situation - you got to know when to walk away (and when to run!) from a potential threat.
Explain to your players before you start gaming that their characters are one small group struggling for survival and there are many larger groups out there that can easily destroy them and so sometimes, they will be better off getting the hell outta Dodge.
A "don't pull the tail of the tiger" sort of thing.
And speaking of animals, the same thing applies if they encounter wild animals such as bears or boars (or tigers!). Yeah they might be able to take it down but at what cost in ammo? And there's always the chance that one of them could get injured... or killed.
By encouraging them to walk away from big threats, you can have large groups of NPCs in an area without having to micro-manage all of them in an encounter. You can also use large groups to subtly manoeuvre the PCs away from danger (or places you haven't got details/info/encounters etc. etc. of)
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