What if more ships were to equip highly enhanced versions of lower level items instead of higher level items? Very few ships actually have enhanced items at all.
- Arco Vaughn: Uses super-boosted Reactive Armor
- Centauri Raider: 10% chance of enhanced Cetauri Recoilless
- Light IAVs: About 10% chance of enhanced weapon
- Medium IAVs: 15% chance of enhanced weapon
- Heavy IAVs: Uses +50% Omni TeV9
- Dragon Slaver: Uses two +50% Particle Beam Weapons.
In some cases, it would make sense to enhance on a lower-level item rather than use a higher-level item. For instance, consumable damage-type enhancements increase damage output without increasing power consumption and have no level restrictions. Armor coatings such as particle coating, reactive coating, ion resistance coating, and ithalium paste grant notable resistance boosts that could effectively substitute for upgrade purchases. However, there is a point where simply upgrading would be more cost efficient than buying a lot of consumable enhancements, since those items do seem to be somewhat scarce. This could be due to an in-universe throw-away consumerism culture that is influencing people to throw things away and buy new things instead improving what they already have.
Still, enhanced items could play a more important role on enemy ship design.