Interesting. I based the nanosubverter off the parasite fleet ship, didn't think to look at the leech starship's numbers.
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I never thought to compare it to the Parasite. I guess that would be a better comparison, since the others are all fleetships...
Let's see here.
A champion with 6 Mk IVs is 36,000 DPS, which falls between the Mk I and Mk II parasites (24,500 and 44,000 DPS respectively).
The 8 Champion fleet of 288,000 DPS is then a bit more than the full Mk I - Mk V set of Parasites (255,000 DPS; 459,000 DPS if you include Mercs, 399,000 DPS without the Mk Vs - aka, what the player can generally rely on getting).
Put in comparison that way, the modules suddenly look much better.
Hmm.
Need to think about this one some more.
Though it does beg the question: why pick (initial homeworld pick or ARS hack-or-not-to-hack) parasite fleet ships when leech starships put out that much reclamation damage? I can see the scandalous tabloid headline now: Leech Starship Overpowered?!?
Turns out I forgot all about the mark-based invisible reclamation damage multiplier.
After a bit more math (necessary) and a bit more thinking (optional), I suspect the problem is that a Champion decked out for full Leech-ness is suboptimal for the task.
36,000 DPS is terrible; but assuming that Mk IV nanosubverters are shooting at a Mk IV level, that works out to 288,000 DPS of "reclamation credit" on another Mk IV ship. Doubling for each lower mark the target is. But doing enough real damage to actually kill something takes too long with pure Nanosubverters equipped. A mix would be needed, of Nanosubverters and something else lethal.
However, at that point, targetting becomes an issue. Anything less that the critical threshold of reclamation damage (50% of target's max HP, right?) is wasted. So the Nanosubverters would need to fire first, and enough of them on a single target, to hit the critical point before real weapons complete the kill.
And I think that's when Leech Starships are likely so much better and reclaiming things than Parasites. When a Leech starship shoots something, it does 60,000 x 3 damage to it = 180,000 real damage and 180,000 * (8, 4, 2, 1) reclamation damage (vs Mk I, II, III, IV). 180,000 damage is enough to kill outright any Mk I triangle ship, resulting in an instant reclaim of that target. Even Mk I Leech shooting a Mk III triangle ship will do 360,000 reclamation damage, which is more than 50% of the Mk III's max HP right there.
On the other hand, the parasites, a full cap of MK I parasites (49) does 196,000 real damage (but half the firing rate of Leech starships means half the DPS). That 196,000 damage is almost certainly going to be spread out amongst many AI ships. Mk I vs Mk I, anything over 16 AI targets means that the reclamation damage level would still be insufficient to reclaim anything. Considering the total DPS of the parasites is so low, other ships would presumably be present to do the actual killing - or in the case of more than 16 AI targets, the kill-stealing, preventing reclamation from occuring.
And that would seem to be the crux of the matter in comparing reclamation weapons: how likely is it to get to the critical point before something else kills the target? With Leech starships, the answer is "Almost always". With parasites, the answer is "Usually not." With a Leech-y Champion as it stands, the answer is "not really." I tried out a 50% Nanosubverters plus 50% Doom Accelerators or 50% Needlers or 50% Acid Jets as my Champion, then went clearing out reinforcements in a few Mk III systems. I was consistantly reclaiming Laser Gatlings or Deflector Drones. I was sometimes reclaiming fighters. I was not reclaiming much of anything else, even other triangle ships. Overall, each trial reclaimed maybe 20 out of 250-300 ships.
I think that if the Nanosubverters were to be changed, one possible change might be to increase the per-shot damage significantly, while slowing the firing rate to match. That would keep the DPS the same, but make it more likely that each individual shot would reclaim something.
