Upgrades

Hi folks!

Today, we'll have a look at NFS' upgrade system, as it's one of the core motivators in this game.

Cars are grouped in "classes", starting at "street", then "classic sports", "muscle", "sports", "super" up to "hyper" as the top class. Car parts are class-specific, so you can't take a street engine and put it into a muscle car.

Each car has 6 parts: engine / turbo (top speed), gearbox / wheels (acceleration) and ECU / nitro (nitro boosting). Cars have
"stages", represented by stars. Same goes for parts - car stage limits part stage, so you can't stick a 5-star part into a 3-star car.

Initially, most cars are locked. You need to find "blueprints" to unlock cars, as well as for staging them up to their maximum level.

The parts themselves have upgrade slots as well, once you filled all upgrade slots, you can "rebuild" the part, giving it one more
star, till the natural limit of the part. 

Parts come in different rarity levels:

• "common" (gray), two stars limit, these are the starting parts for the lower-class cars
• "uncommon" (green), three stars limit
• "rare" (blue), five stars limit
• "epic" (purple), six stars limit
• "legendary" (gold), seven stars limit

When a part has reached its limit, you need an increasing amount of "upgrade kits" to lift it to the next tier. Needless to say, any kind of modification costs money (cash, mostly). It's possible to move parts around between cars within the same tier, but so far I haven't bothered, since that costs cash, which I can use to better ends, and  I'm a completionist / collector kind of player anyway.