Sure has even evacuation missions are tougher I'm getting dogged with fsd reboot missles and the goids definitely seem more angry. I wonder how much critically wounded evacs weigh compared to combat have never gotten a straight answer on this throughout the entire war.
Not from fdev, no, although putting the war progress into the journal has helped us to work it out a bit. There are usually too many people in an Invasion to measure it absolutely to 6 decimal places but that does not make observation worthless and we have been doing Invasions from the start, so we have at least a good idea of what works there.
And yes, Thargoid aggression seem to have been ramped up everywhere. Rescues are definitely a lot more dangerous, especially from Damaged Ports where the Scythes hang around in packs. By the time you have picked up passengers the instance has ramped up with Scouts and Interceptors as well. Assuming you escape and jump away you are virtually guaranteed to be hyperdicted by Scythes. Still at least that's only the first jump out now, they don't follow you all the way to the rescue ship any more. Be grateful for small mercies, or something.
The Banshees at AX Reactivations are detecting you much sooner, while you are still 4 km or so from the settlement, making a stealthy approach almost impossible now. Subtlety be damned, I'm taking Sirius AX Missiles to kill the Banshee and the Revenants with, then landing and dismissing my ship, going in and hopefully doing all that before the Interceptors turn up.
Since Scythes came in we have found that killing them at Damaged Ports works well. Somewhere between 100 and 150 killed at a Damaged Port in a system 20 ly from the Titan was enough to move the bar a pip when we tried it, at a time of day when we were as sure as we could be that we were the only ones there or could make the odd one or two that might also be there statistically irrelevant.
It's hectic though. The mixture of Goids at a Damaged Port and the way the instance ramps up faster than a CZ means it gets busy fast so casual AX pilots (including me) do not want to hang about. You get Scouts and Interceptors coming in as you stay in the instance to kill Scythes and they keep coming. Usually the Interceptors are Cyclops but they can throw the odd Basilisk in there. We've been doing runs in and out, killing a few Scythes, leaving to reset the instance, going back in and repeating, while using the port for repairs.
Comparing combat to passengers is not comparing like for like, nor does one activity in Invasions seem to completely outshine the rest as sampling does in Alerts and Controls so in that respect it's not going to give you a simple "do this, it's the best" option. Evaluating like for like, critical wounded do more for progress than regular passengers but what really counts when doing rescues is stacking mission bonuses which are worth more than pure numbers.
We do know that the mission bonus for Injured in Alerts is worth more than the actual number of Injured and also worth more than the mission bonus for a regular passenger mission, because with people generally leaving Alerts alone we have better data. While we have not been able to measure it as exactly in an Invasion you get Injured, Wounded and Critically Wounded and the bar always moves faster when we take them compared to regular passengers, although since the introduction of personal as well as group passenger missions we don't know the value of the personal ones yet but would be surprised if they were massively different and so far they do not appear to be. They seem to have been put in there for variety and to offer the occasional cushy mission for 50 million once you're allied with all the factions there, not to be overbalanced compared to group passenger missions or wounded.
I should mix up what I do similar to other bgs activities
The Thargoid War Machine is not the BGS. There are no diminishing returns by doing just one thing as there are in BGS, you could clear a system doing just one thing and it would be worth the same at the end as at the start. Either you do enough work to finish the system or you don't. There's nothing more to it than that.
You only need to mix up activities to give yourself a bit of variety, it is not required for progress. Any activity is simply worth what it is worth, a static amount which is then modified by the distance from the Titan to decide how much of it would need to be done for that system, and sadly there is no bonus for combining activities either.
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