If Parasite DPS is being dropped by a certain amount, their reclamation damage bonus should be increased by an amount greater than the drop in raw DPS.
I was thinking something like that, yea. Probably what I'd do is cut the dps to 1/6 what it is now, and do the 8x/4x/2x/1x thing by mark. I'd like to avoid these becoming totally useless in the "just kill the target" role, because I want all fleet ships to be capable of doing something like damage. The nanoswarms are the closest thing to an exception to that, dunno how they are dps wise.
For nanoswarms, would it be possible to give them a ranged attack? As in the ship is a capsule that degrades, but gets the nanoswarms close, and then bursts and the nanoswarms go shooting off through space at ships within something like 3000 range. Since raw damage isn't as necessary to nanoswarms as it is to autobombs, it would help with getting some target dispersion to get more ships reclaimable.
About a month ago I retuned the autobomb/nanoswarm to spread out their targeting behavior much more so distinct blobs of enemies will generally all get hit if the nanoswarms are in sufficient numbers and making their own targeting decisions. They already have the grenade-type area affect, so they'll achieve fairly decent coverage of a blob too, if there are enough nanoswarms. Perhaps I could make the nanoswarm's explosion radius a bit bigger, if that's the problem.
The other problem with nanoswarms is coordinating them with fleets - they have such low HP that even using a regen chamber isn't exactly helpful, so you're kind of stuck with using the "neinzul machine gun" method, which just tends to waste a lot of nanoswarms.
Yea, I only ever use the mushroom-machine-gun technique, honestly. But you could load them up in a transport if you wanted, or keep them in low-power until you want to send forth the doomshrooms.