I don't think I understand what is the purpose of pressing Z when there's no drawback for just spamming X as fast as possible.
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Yeah, it’s not super obvious :
If you can use Z to make larger connected components you should get higher scores overall (the score for each alien in a group is multiplied by the size of the group).
So you should be able to get overall higher scores if you’re careful with the laser than if you just spam from the start.
At some point it gets too fast and I end up devolving to spamming as you say.