Helping mage followers?

Hmm, this is not something new but mage followers tend to suck because they rarely cast any spell, preferring to tank straight to the monsters even when they have no close combat skill.
I saw Geoffrey die twice in ashburry castle cause he was casting his protection shield only when he was down to around 10 hit points.

I know Chris Beddoes used a work-around in car arcanum, it consisted in increasing the followers fatigue, but does someone know if there is a way to change their behavior so they are a little less conservative of their fatigue points.
I had a look at ai_params.mes but there is nothing there concerning when mage followers will use their spells.

In case adding free points to them is the only way to help them cast spells more often, does someone know how Chris achieved this?

It would be nice to have smarter followers even without the entire car mod. Is there something we can do. I don't have any experience with moding this game but i had a look at some of the files and plan to modify some leveling schemes to remove silly-bugged spells like Raven's water elemental form. I'd like to do something about their behaviour too if it's possible without heavy modification of scripts or things like this.