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: Artillery' 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.

• The advantage of upgrading techs is increasing the mark (MK) level of your units: i.e., your ships, turrets, or 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 Core tech category, ALL V-Wings currently alive and built after this upgrade will become MK3.

• The tooltips for techs that you can upgrade show you which ships and/or turrets will benefit, how much strength they will gain, as well as how many of them you have.

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

• Upgrading techs isn't the only way you can upgrade the mark level of your turrets and other structures. Centerpiece direct upgrades to Command Stations, Battlestations and Citadels will also increase them, but while a centerpiece direct upgrade will only affect its own units, a tech upgrade will boost the units it applies to across the galaxy. Science spent in this way will not be lost if you change the type of the Command station, Battlestation or Citadel. (This also upgrades engineers attached to that specific fleet.)

• 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. However, note that no unit can exceed mark level 7, regardless of how many direct upgrades or tech upgrades might apply. There are also some structures that are markless and cannot be upgraded at all, such as the basic planetary factories.

• The fleet centerpieces, EXCEPT for Command stations, Battlestations and Citadels, do not have techs associated with them to upgrade them. Instead, they can also be upgraded directly using science. For most ship-based centerpieces (Transports, Officers, Golems), direct upgrades only affect the centerpiece itself. For combat factories, their drones are also affected by the direct upgrade.

• You can refund spent science, by using the "Retrieve Spent Science" at the bottom of the tech menu, for a cost in Hacking Points. This includes Science spent on Direct Upgrades.

A note on refund strategy: This can be very useful and allows for some flexibility if you initially invest science in a technology that, it later turns out, has relatively few ship lines available, but is still not to be undertaken lightly, since choices to take fleets and/or hack for ship/turret lines of that tech type that you may have undertaken in the meantime will now be less effective. Refunding direct upgrades can have almost no opportunity cost if you have spare hacking, however. (For example due to lack of suitable hacking targets caused by either high Hacking availability due to added factions, or high hacking difficulty caused by very high level AI's.)