Finished playing a game of On Mars: Alien Invasion with me playing as the aliens in Scenario 1 in a 3v1 game.

Unfortunately, I performed really poorly, ending the game with only 10 of my 20 aliens deployed when the humans won. I felt I made several serious mistakes in my play:

• Getting the reusable action tokens quickly is not a very good play, because the aliens have to spend all of their action tokens before they can reset and do any of the actions again. Being able to reset so you can do actions again is very important. Try to get as few of the reusable tokens as possible so you can repeat actions more quickly.
• It’s very important to get a crystal economy going so that you can always use the expendable action tokens with your red reusable ones. If you manage the crystal economy well, you can double up on the number of actions you do each turn and you can reset more quickly. If you don’t do well, you’ll be stuck spending one expendable action token at a time until you can finally reset.
• Alien blueprints are not very useful because they never get better. At most, you can use an alien scientist to activate one for free along with your other actions. I would try to get the blueprint that lets the aliens place corruption first.
• Be more aggressive with alien building placement. I thought that it would suck to get locked out of placement because of being enclosed by player buildings, but it is difficult to move aliens around because you can only move the aliens once every reset (and you need to unlock the action space to do so as well!).
• Try to place buildings every reset if you can. This greatly increases the available area for deployment later in the game. Otherwise, you may find that you don’t have enough space to place aliens.

In particular, I tried early on in the game to acquire and build blueprints and get reusable action tokens. This led to really bad tempo in the beginning on the game, where I found myself unable to deploy any aliens to harass the players with. Then, I placed my alien structures too far away from the humans and I because of my poor crystal economy I found myself unable to unlock alien movement until LSS 2. I mostly deployed aliens near the end of the game, placing 4 or 5 at a time, but by then it was much too late and the humans were able to pull off several 10 point combos to end the game.