[*]complete aid and humanitarian missions. I'm not sure which those are, I've done quite a few donation missions and none have given me merits, given the delay in control score I don't know if these give any
For an Acquisition, these are the power reactivation missions at Odyssey bases. So you need to build some of those, and then kick the faction which ends up owning them until they shut down, then take the missions to power them back up again.
[*]sell mined resources. Can I mine Platinum in this system and sell it within the system to increase control score? Or do the resources need to be mined elsewhere? Or sold elsewhere?
For Acquisitions, you need to mine the resources in the existing Power system supporting the Acquisition, then sell them locally.
(Fortified within 20 LY, Stronghold within 30 LY)
[*]holoscreen hacking. I can hack holoscreens on the 2 coriolis ports in the system, I get a few merits for this but not a huge amount
Also watch your reputation with the station controlling faction when you do this - you need to be doing something
else that tops it up again. It's not a fast method on its own, the advantage is that you can spend a couple of spare limpets on it every time you visit for some mostly-free extra merits.
[*]transport powerplay commodities. I'm doing this at around 250/hour; sometimes the source has 500, not sure what dictates that. So far this has been the biggest earner of control score.
The allocation is due to your Powerplay rank (and the occasional doubling is because of how it runs the timers for it)
Those four listed activities are the ones your Power gives a 50% bonus for - but there are other activities which count as well and can be effective even without the bonus. See the Pilots' Handbook for more information. The more efficient ones include:
1) You can steal Powerplay goods and data from Odyssey settlements (build some with lots of data ports) and return them to the Power Contact in your supporting Fortified or Stronghold system (who can also give you Power Injection Malware to upload to the data ports)
2) You can bounty hunt (if your system doesn't have anywhere for RES sites, building a Pirate Installation might give you a suitable target-rich environment, and other Installation types can also generate scenarios). Or just lower your system security a bit so you can hunt mission enemies in supercruise.
Also does the control score decrease on the weekly tick? Will my efforts be for nothing if I don't get to min. control score by Thursday?
No, take as long as you like [1]. Progress is banked and doesn't decay. Doing an entire Acquisition single-handed in a single week isn't technically
impossible but nor is it expected.
[1] Assuming there are no
other Powers in range to acquire your system. If there are you also need to outpace them, though it's still likely to be a multi-week battle.
