I was pretty surprised by this since when you change between excavators, higher "efficiency" means more stones per pull. However, I never bothered to test this just with enhancers because I assumed the in-game stats increasing meant the same. I went and did some formal testing, and it looks like these enhancers are bugged.
I'm on Cyrene right now, so I tested my tier 2 Improved Excavator for alternating claims (no enhancers or 2 enhancers) on Yellow Crystal. That's 18.2 eff. vs 15.2 as the stats are shown in-game. After 125 pulls each, I averaged 79.6 stones per pull with 2 enhancers, and 79.1 stones per pull with none (p =0 .76). That p-value from a t-test confirms that there is no significant difference between the two and that tiny bit of difference is just random variation rather than an actual treatment effect. I thought it might just be an effect that would show through on averages, but no dice. That excavator should have forced an effect since only two other excavators have higher eff.
So in short, the enhancers do not work as advertised at all even though the in-game window actually says efficiency is increased. I'm not one who goes out of the way criticize MA, but this one is extremely misleading. Thanks for Deepa2 bringing this up, because I sure wouldn't have thought to even double check this. I'm glad I didn't spend 6k in MU to go to tier 3 in my excavator, and I'm definitely not doing it in the near future.
Just for reference, an ME/01 has 6.8 eff. and averages around 34.9 stones per pull after about 50 pulls. Between that and the impoved, it looks like for every efficiency an excavator has, it will pull about 5.2 stones per pull. If the in-game window's listed stats with enhancers of 18.2 followed the same trend, my testing should have pulled around 93 stones per pull on average instead of 79.
