Thank you Skyline_HUN I had never seen the Gameplay.constants file yet (was only editing .entity files)I actually managed to change the upgrade time, I set it to 2 seconds (PurchaseNextLevelTime 2) as a test and it does indeed purchase the level almost instantly.
Thank you so much maerlyn now my windows search does indeed search within .entity which is awesome

I had been using windows search for finding files (A search for CAPITALSHIP_TECH to find all TEC Capital ship files for example) but soon realized that searching for "A word or phrase in the file" was turning up no results.
Thank you both for the help