Re: "Calling" Contacts
I also really like the idea of having to be at a system's hyper comm and potentially using up a Gamma Core. It's a non-trivial expense that saves you some time, especially if you're a well-developed player with your own faction at some distance from the Core Worlds. I guess if you're swimming in Gamma Cores, you can make use of such a system more often but I don't know how much, if any, the AI Cores have changed. Gamma Cores don't do a whole lot for Colonies in the current version and it's not uncommon for me to have 20+ stored up after going into a few Red Beacon [REDACTED] system.
Even if Gamma Cores are unchanged (i.e. relatively useless to me under normal circumstances), the choice I now have is to use them to call my contacts or to turn them in for credits/rep with factions. That they're used as a high-end form of "currency" either way makes them vastly more important to me than present. Heck, if that was the case, I'd like to see more ways AI Cores could be used as currency for other forms of trade/mechanics.
Re: Deployment changes
Yeah, that's a pretty big bombshell! But very cool, too. That does make smaller/faster craft much more valuable for both running interference and getting behind the enemy lines.
Somewhat off-topic but it's always bugged me that bigger ships don't capture points faster than smaller ships. Something about the opportunity cost of having a capital wait around to capture a point the same length as a frigate just hasn't sat well with me. (The capital being at full speed and passively capturing the point on the way notwithstanding!) I've always felt that there could be modifiers to the capture rate, either by ship size, by deployment point cost of the ship in question, by number of ships within the capture zone, etc. However, there's never been a reason to really dive into it because the objectives were never all that important.
Now, with this new system, capturing/holding will be more important and modifiers to capture rate may be worth looking into. Capture rate could be based on ships size, but perhaps the inverse of my original logic: Frigates capture the fastest to keep them useful later. Or perhaps there's a hull mod that increases capture rate so that you make certain ships in your fleet more specialized in this role. Just a thought.
@ Amoebka
I think that's a great way of making Distress Beacons more important/worthwhile. At a certain point in the game, answering Distress Beacons is never worth it from a cost/benefit perspective.