Enhancement

Enhancement is a process that allows a faction to use tech points to improve the capabilities of their ships. The process is performed at the system level of a specific variant, even though tech points are earned at the model level.

Enhancement should not be confused with Adjustment, even though both are ways of improving ship performance, they consume different resources, have a different user interface, and are applied in different ways. One of the main differences is that while enhancement can affect many different systems in different ways, adjustment affects only one thing, and that is the Damage per hit of the individual weapons (not weapon systems). Keep in mind that adjustment is applied **on top of enhancement**, that is a 20% increase in damage per hit from enhancement with a 30% increase from adjustment nets a total increase of 56%.

Most enhancements fall into one of these categories:

* Improve the performance of mining equipment (utility ships)
* Improve movement speed (sometimes just warp)
* Improve armor and other defensive systems
* Improve performance of a specific aspect of a specific weapon (time per shot, damage, hit probability)
* Strategies - usually for weapon systems

Important things to remember about enhancements:

* A ship must return to the faction base in order for the enhancement to take effect
	+ Utility ships do this automatically when dropping off mined resources at the faction base but they **DO NOT** when dropping mined resources off at an advanced mining platform (yes they must be sent all the way back to the player's base)
* Enhancements can be reset; the tech points are released back allowing new enhancements to be selected
	+ When enhancements are reset, the loss of that improvement is immediate across **all ships regardless of where they are**, so if the player has fleets that are away from the base, resetting enhancements is probably a bad idea
* Enhancements only apply to the variant for which they are selected and not to any other variants of the same model of ship
* All enhancements are reset when the player moves to the Hub System at the end of a phase (due to blueprint experience being reset to zero)

## How to

In order to enhance the systems of a variant, the player will need to navigate to the main ship blueprint panel for that variant. The ship pages can be accessed from the Blueprints page, off of the Expanse View or from the Ship production page off of the Base View.

### Enhancement slots

On the main page, every system that can be enhanced will have, underneath the system name, a group of narrow rectangular indicators - each indicator is an enhancement slot for that ship system. The number of indicators may be less than the number of available enhancements for that system and when all the slots are full, no more enhancements can be applied. The indicators are empty or full indicating that the enhancement slot status.

### System page

When the player clicks on the label of a system that can be enhanced, the page for that system will appear. On this page, the player can read detailed information about the system. In the lower right corner is the enhancement display/control.

Click on an empty enhancement slot, or the control on the far right to bring up the enhancement popup for that system.

Click on the icon of a filled enhancement slot to get an explanation of what enhancement fills that slot.

The enhancement popup has a box at the bottom right giving the number of tech points available. If the enhancement has already been applied it will appear at the bottom and be clearly marked. If the available tech points are not enough points for an available enhancement, then the point cost will be shown in red, otherwise it will be shown in blue.

On the enhancement popup, the player clicks on an enhancement to select it. An **ENHANCE** button will appear in the box for that enhancement. For some enhancements, the effects on the ship's capabilities may be shown in flashing red text.

Click the **ENHANCE** button to activate that enhancement.

## Reseting

In the bottom left corner of the enhancement popup is a reset button. Pressing this button will remove all the enhancements to this system and refund any tech points that were used for them.

The ability to reset the enhancements gives a player tremendous flexibility in how their fleet is configured. The refunded tech points can be used to choose different enhancements for this ship system, enhancements in other systems, or even to enhance other variants of the same model.

Resetting enhancements can be useful to tweak ship performance for different types of enemy fleets, to make corrections as players learn about what sorts of enhancements are best for a particular variant of ship, or to apply tech points to a more useful variant that the player recently acquired blueprints for.

Players should keep in mind that when enhancements are reset, all ships of that variant are affected immediately, wherever they might be or might be or whatever they might be doing. On the other hand, adding enhancements only takes effect to ships that are at or have returned to the player's base.