Been playing around with Gal Civ 4 for a couple of weeks now after a very long absence from 4x gaming, exploring just what is different from GC 3 and in general poking at a lot of the great new things that the game provides.  Very impressed with what I've seen so far.  

I did just run into something, however, and it inspired me to leave some UI feedback.

I just made a bug report concerning problems in unlocking the Galactic Challenge Awakened Urges, but there's a related issue that I wanted to make a separate thread.  Namely players will not know about the existence of a challenge until the prerequisites are already unlocked, which seems somewhat counter-intuitive.

The critique on the UI design I have for this is that some of the challenges require unusual or late game states to unlock.  Perhaps a challenge that has not yet met the requirements to be unlocked can still be displayed, but grayed out, so players know of the existence of the challenge and can work toward the game state needed since the UI tells the player the basic requirement for the Challenge. Something similar to the current usage of the Orbital Improvement UI, for example, where an improvement is grayed out but says "Tech X required".

The main potential problem I see here is that at least two of the current Challenges (Shard of Mithrilar and Throne of the Arnor) require researching the tech Precursor Origins, which is locked to the Ancient race ability (for non-Synthetic races).  If a player can't ever qualify for it, perhaps those Challenges shouldn't be displayed? As well as any other Challenges which might be soft locked for various races?

For example, I think under the most recent versions of the game, it isn't displaying impossible to acquire improvements on the Orbital Improvement UI (for instance not being able to get orbital improvements like the Orbital Techapod Hatchery if one doesn't have the Farming trait), so perhaps something similar could be done here?

This would also help with users being able to report bugs/harder to unlock than intended Challenges, as it's easier to notice that one isn't qualifying for a Challenge that they should be if they know about the existence (and requirements) of the Challenge in the first place.  In fact it wasn't until I had done several rounds of very long 50+ turn testing before I came to the conclusion that there was in fact a bug involving Awakened Urges as opposed to a merely very difficult unlock condition.

(NOTE: Awakened Urges does seem to be unlockable right now, but it appears one has to play 50 turns without a reload/restart of the game as opposed to "only" being at peace for 50 turns)

If players know they should be getting a Challenge but don't seem to be for one reason or another, they're probably more likely to leave some sort of bug report/feedback on the issue.  

To give another example, I'm planning on looking into just why the Galactic Challenge New Eden has never unlocked for me, despite having far more than 9 colonies.  Haven't really started to dig into this one which is why I haven't filed a bug report about it yet. But if more people even knew about it, it might have been flagged earlier.  If it is indeed a bug, of course.