AI War 2:Techs

• Techs (technologies) are one of the key ways to improve the effectiveness of your ships and structures. Available techs can be accessed from the Tech sidebar.

• Rather than being tied to individual ships, a given technology benefits a variety of units. For example, the 'Weapon: Concussion' tech improves the Concussion Corvette, the Concussion Turret, the Siege Frigate, etc.

• You spend the science resource in order to purchase an upgrade in a given tech category. Each tech has multiple levels, and subsequent levels cost more science to purchase, sometimes exponentially more.

• One of the best advantages of upgrading techs is increasing the mark (MK) level of your units: i.e., your ships, turrets, and other structures.
  • All ships are upgraded at once from a tech upgrade instead of being built as individual marks. For example, if you have MK2 V-Wings somewhere in the galaxy, and you upgrade the Generalist tech category, ALL V-Wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become MK3.
  • Upgrading techs isn't the only way you can upgrade your units' mark levels, as fleet upgrades will also tend to increase them, but while a fleet upgrade will only affect its own units, a tech upgrade will boost the units it applies to across all fleets. This means that unit mark levels are a combination of all the techs that benefit them (some have more than one), as well as any upgrades to the tech level of their specific fleet.

• The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade show you which ships will benefit as well as how many of them you have. It doesn't show you the mark level of the ships, because you might have several different mark levels of each ship type since they may be upgraded by fleet upgrades.

• More techs will appear in the tech sidebar as you capture fleets with ships that can benefit from them.

• Note that for an individual ship/turret/whatever type, there's no risk of it going above its max mark level, which is either 7 or is explicitly defined as something lower, or is markless. If it subscribes to 2 techs that each have 1 upgrade, it would naturally be mark 3, unless it is capped at mark 2, in which case it will sit at mark 2. And if its fleet is also upgraded 3x, then it would be mark 6, unless it was capped lower.

• The fleet centerpieces, EXCEPT for the lone wolf ones (just the Spire Frigates) and citadels, do not have techs associated with them to upgrade them. Instead, they just upgrade via the EXP gains of their fleet itself.

• It is also possible to upgrade a Command Station on an owned planet. This will permanently increase the mark of every member of your Command Station's "planetary fleet" on this specific planet. Changing the type of the station or losing and recapturing the planet doesn't make it lose the upgrade.