banshees work quiet okay against fast colossi, especially if you get a raven along, if you add vikings to this you can even snipe the obs and use cloak. Depends how good your unit control is as those are 3 very different units to control. But they work wonders together giving any toss a hard time if they teched really fast.

And its not to costly to add a second starport a bit later, especially since techlab means you can get some upgrades. While I don't want to encourage people to use it, because it really depends on your playstyle, medivac energy is something to consider getting as against colossi you won't have a constant stream of medivacs making it really important to keep your army at health (since it will be really marauder heavy). So you don't end up like most terrans after they beat the main toss army, everything in the red hehe and empty medivacs.

Banshees cost more supply and in an engagement are more likely to die, so they need a bit more of micro (pull back out of range when red and let them hit zealots hehe), makes them more expensive then vikings, who generally stay alive even if your ground army looses. Banshees are perfect at the start for harassment so the first 4-8 banshees are mostly worth their cost, but are weak to stargate play (as a toss i would always add a stargate if i scout a techlab starport), and once the stalkers reach one shot mass+ blink, the banshees die to fast, so there needs to be a transition into vikings at some point. But as long as a banshee group of 4 or more remains it is a huge deal when it comes to engagements, as they can go for a pylon all kills and other things.

Pure vikings is the less concentration costing way though.

Cloud9157

United States2968 Posts

December 16 2011 06:52 GMT

#43

I'm Protoss, but I feel Vikings are still superior.

The range really is the issue. Maybe its harder for a Stalker to take down a Banshee, but there is this cool thing called focus firing. Target Banshees 1 at a time and they go down pretty easy.

Also, if you scout Colossi, are you really going to have enough time to pump out enough Banshees to actually focus down 2 or 3 Colossi? Doesn't seem very feasible to me.

unix04

United States89 Posts

December 16 2011 06:56 GMT

#44

You can preserve vikings better while keeping protoss from pushing hard with a lot of colossi. Banshee has good dps, but when you engage 4 banshees against 8+ stalkers, you basically lose your banshee in 2 shots. By the time you kill 1 stalker and damage another, you just lost 1 banshee. Your DPS decreases by 25% while the stalker army loses less than half of that. You could argue your land army will also be attacking the stalkers, but a couple of forcefields and guardian shield will minimize the damage enough to give protoss the resource advantage in kills.

In a scenario where protoss goes colossi, I think vikings are the better choice. At worst, they can be used to scout, be meat shields for your MMM army, harassment on the mineral line (land, attack and fly off), or even tank spotters should you decide you wanna try mech instead. At best, you took down their best DPS dealers efficiently and you ripped their ground army to shreds. At that point, you are likely heavily favored to win. Whether they can effectively deal damage is a moot point.

That said, vikings aren't a general strategy against protoss, and they never were. So it's not really an argument to say banshees are better against protoss in general than the viking. Banshees are great harass units, but if you are going to argue in favor of DPS, i'd replace them with marines and marauders and use the extra gas on upgrades. a handful of marauders coming from the flank can take down colossi pretty fast.

Yoshi Kirishima

United States10378 Posts

December 16 2011 07:03 GMT

#45

On December 16 2011 13:14 Ver wrote:
You need to address concerns about feedback to make this comparison valid. Yes you can get around feedback either by wasting energy with cloak, which is not the most flexible option, or emping your own banshees which means you must have a huge amount of gas to afford that many ghosts to waste mana. But if you don't do either and the protoss brings out templar, you just lost.

Also versus colossus armies gateway units are mostly just fodder; colossus are the real threat. Most major terran victories versus colossus armies rely on the vikings to take out colossus before the latter can get enough hits on bio. Vikings kill colossus very fast from afar, which is why they are a given. Banshees simply do damage too slow and don't give you the ability to snipe colossus before the battle. Your best case scenario with banshees is if all their stalkers/archons die and the protoss army has to retreat until they can warp in more. This can work as a surprise move especially versus players who tend to overmake zealots with no stalkers but as a regular strategy? Forget it. There's a reason viking is the go-to unit.

Well it only takes 1-2 EMPs since you can stack... also, burning your energy down to 25 or lower should nullify the affect of the HTs, but someone could math that out.

Also keep in mind that getting 1 HT means losing 0.75 Colossus, in gas.

But I do agree with you, the 9 range is very important.