Am I correct in assuming that since contacts show up in the intel screen, their display in said screen shouldn't be set in stone? For example, making the icon/name change dynamically (for an obvious example, someone who hides their identity until more trust is earned) or showing a "fake" importance that doesn't confirm to the 1-5 scale? Just making sure since having those displays completely set in stone on the coding side would make the system quite rigid and hard to use for mods.
You could probably do whatever you want with a custom intel item. The default one will reflect changes in the PersonAPI backing it, though, so that sounds like it might be good enough for your purposes. Importance is locked to the 1-5 scale, though; with how many things are keyed off that, it wouldn't make sense not to.
Are contacts forcing you to choose one of the factions in the long term, or are there other mechanisms for that, or nothing at all? Currently you can amass quite some wealth without crossing any factions, at least until you plant a flag on some rock that flies faster than it falls.
It doesn't lock you to a faction, though it does make it easier to gain faction rep since completing missions for a contact will also increase your rep with the faction.
Speaking of that — wouldn't it make sense if hits on faction fleets were ordered by other factions, too? They have both more reasons and more money to make it happen.
Military contacts will in fact offer some missions that are military in nature
Is there any cost to making new contracts? Credits, special items, relationship?
Completing a mission for them (from the bar), generally. It's not hard but it's not supposed to be.
Will multi tag contacts offer special missions?
Not right now. It's easily possible - in fact there's explicit support for it via the mission spreadsheet. But multi-tag contacts aren't really much of a thing in vanilla; IIRC there's only one very low-importance one right now, mostly for flavor.
Also, I don't think I got that — does this system entirely replace other intel missions/bounties/etc. stuff, or is it meant to cover everything that isn't run of the mill basic stuff? System that entirely relies on contacts might not be easily noticed by newcomers.
It doesn't, though I might remove the basic Procurement mission, since it gets pretty much duplicated by the contact stuff. But Analyze/Survey missions and bounties are I think in a good place - the surface-level stuff anyone has access too, and then you can dig into contacts as well.
Do you get contacts at your own colonies? Say, my first colony developed into a nice size 6+ world that is as big as a major faction's capital world. Player can get bar missions from his own worlds.
You might get underworld contacts there, but not player-faction contacts. Those would be too weird - the default interaction writing doesn't work, etc.
This looks great! I wonder, are there any mechanics for contacts reaching out to contact the player if they've done something exceptional? I'm thinking if they are below their 5 contact limit and complete a "hard" general bounty there is some chance of this attracting the attention of a contact. Similarly for smuggling to someplace with demand, or trading in survey data.
There aren't - right now, it's entirely bar-based. I've been half-thinking about whether other stuff - such as, say, handing in Alpha Cores - could/should result in contacts, as well. I think "how the player gets contacts, especially high importance ones" could be an interesting area to expand. But it's not something that's really gotten much attention at this point; the focus has just been on adding missions etc. There's a lot of them!
If I have one wish on the modding side of things, its that those very convenient looking functions be in the autogenerated API somewhere, so modders have a complete list of them. Short descriptions of what they do would also be great, though I know that can turn into a lot of work.
They'll be in the API javadoc, yeah, since they're all implemented in base mission classes. Comments/descriptions, though... not very likely, no. Most of the methods have names that pretty much describe what they do anyway. Something tricky, though, I could see adding a comment here and there for.
If the colony the contact lived in was destroyed or decivilized, is the contact dead and removed automatically, or does he become a waste of a slot until you dismiss him yourself?
Neither. They lose one level of importance and move to another faction colony. If importance is already very low or there's no colony to move to, then they go away.