by Ranior
I think the main story of that Swarmlings game is simply that they were the wrong faction choice. There's a few things about how you played them that I also will point out, but mostly you were competent with them and in a better set up probably get 3rd or 2nd which is pretty good 4th picking into Darklings/Cultists/Giants.But anyhow the set up does look pretty bad for Swarmlings. Where are your points going to come from this game? Swarmlings tend to like to build their SH and SA early yet there is no early scoring for that. Even worse those scoring tiles are R5/R6. This is tough for almost any faction to score much during, but many will at least get 5 points where you probably will get nothing. You also have no inherent faction scoring to take advantage of so all your resources that you're ramping your economy up for in the early rounds have no good outlet to generate points.
There are a few passing bons that you can try to score with throughout the game. You can build some towns and maybe compete on cults and network. But you did manage to do those things and still wound up with a losing score. I think it is mostly because you had little ability to gain any points from the round bonuses and your faction couldn't generate any on their own.
As for playing them a little better, when you take FAV 10 in R1 you could have taken Fav11 instead. You had 3 structures on board at that point and ended with 12, so Fav11 would have gained you 18 points compared to the 15 you got with Fav10. Fav10 also did manage to help you towards some early cult bonuses though, so I'm not as convinced this was a mistake.
Once again here it seems you like Act5 a bit more than I would. Burning 4 power in R1 just to get one more dwelling out isn't all that great. You also later on convert a w to c to complete your SH+TE+D start. Yet you struggle on w income for much of the rest of the game. Overall I'm not convinced spending the resources to get that extra Dwelling down in R1 was worth it. Similar to what steve points out above you could have instead taken a priest and send it to Earth to get a R1 cult spade that way. (Although Darklings maybe beat you to it, but even 2 steps on Earth coupled with Fav11 would have worked). Not sure any of these are clearly better options, but I am pretty sure the R1 Act5 coupled with w to c conversion is a bad play.
Also you never build your SA which is a little sad. I'm not sure it hurt you that much but the SA is pretty nice for Swarmlings as you generate 2 priests plus get another favor tile. Plus it hopefully sets you up to get 3 towns a bit easier which tends to be another way Swarmlings aim to get points to compete with other factions.
Overall I probably would have taken Mermaids in this game. With Giants right in front of you it seems likely to assume they will open with a SH, especially if you let them have BON6. That opens you up to a TE opening with FAV11. With two straight dwelling rounds right after that along with Mermaids early shipping, you probably can build on quite a few hexes. You can even open with Bon5 to secure Act6 early on easily giving you plenty of hexes to build upon. Mermaids are one of the few factions that really don't need to build SH/SA early, so you can save them and build them towards the end for some points. Admittedly there is no Bon10 here which you'd really like as Mermaids, but you can still make use of Bon9 early on and after R4 probably can take use of Bon7 for at least six points. (As you'd like to build at least 3 if not all 4 TP's in R4 and largely leave them on the board for the rest of the game.) Mermaids can largely build towns in the same spots you did without having to spend for the bridges and they would have less time managing connection with the possibility of 5 shipping. (Plus if you're building SH late you're going to be at 2 shipping at least so advancing to 5 isn't any more laborious than it is for any other faction plus you get a few more points for doing so)
I've rambled on enough though. The lesson there is you just made the wrong faction pick.