Haven't seen mention of what's planned, but my take on combat initiation is thus...

Hailing and fighting should be related, but independent. First the option to hail is presented. If a race hails, they're identified to the other race (including counting as first contact if appropriate). Then the option to fight is presented. If either race chooses to, combat ensues, where hailing is not an option. This does several things. Firstly, if you haven't already met them, by declining to hail, official contact is not made, which can have repercussions. Secondly, it prevents the annoying situation in BOTF where by choosing to hail you're essentially giving hostiles (and sometimes even peaceful ones, I've seen the Vulcans do it) a free turn to whack on you or even worse turning over control of your fleet to the auto-calc. Hailing and scanning distances are considerably longer than combat distances anyway. Of course, the exception to this is an impenetrable cloak, in which case only the cloaked ship is presented with options to hail and/or fight. And if both sides are fully cloaked, of course nobody has any options because they'd have no idea the other was even there.