

I don't think Paradox does a great job of deciding what to lock behind "potential" (where the user won't see it if they fail the conditions) vs.

It's just that there's not a single civic (unless you add them with mods) having a "possible" block allowing more than one of those authority types (the four "normal" ones are clustered into a single check). It's also done for the UI around things like civics and traits there's no inherent reason the list of available (or disallowed) civics changes completely whenever you switch between normal, Corporate, Hive, or Machine authority (in-game or at empire creation). For example, non-Machine-Gestalt empires don't even see the option for the "Machine Age" ascension perk why should they, when it'd be greyed out all game with a message "Requires Authority: Machine Intelligence" and that's not something you can change after game start? Even some things that you can potentially change (like getting the ability to terraform to a Gaia planet) don't show up if you don't have the suitable ascension perk or technology or whatnot (you'll notice that decisions like Resort World or Penal Colony aren't available from the start of the game, either).

Click to expand.It's mostly done to keep the UI sane.
