Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
They might not be that good defensively, but if you are Boxer you could micro the Goliaths against Mutalisks by retreating a step after every shot. The slight range advantage means you can take on Mutalisks reasonably well if you have room to back off. Not that useful against harassment of course.
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Being Boxer is a high requirement =p
They're still good against mass mutalisks but usually not the best choice when numbers are large. Goliaths have trouble with rugged terran, and large numbers of marines/medics start to overpower mutalisks just due to their dps and can run faster. Marines also outrange mutas so you can't snipe large blobs of them.
It's also significantly harder to repair goliaths than to heal marines so in large engagements they start to lack durability. Massing goliaths out of factories as opposed to mm or the zerg with mutalisks and whatever they feel like making is expensive too. It doesn't mean that you can't kill a zerg with a goliath heavy army, but that is also very situational
The real answer is that you can more cost effectively destroy mass mutas with a few science vessels and irradiate.
Still my point is more about timing. It doesn't matter who can win in a straight up fight if you can't build them fast enough when the enemy comes. Goliaths were fairly accessible and not too expensive so you could try them as a deterrent; thors and vikings are generally a significant investment that just come too late.
Though you do bring up a point that micro made a huge difference in BW. Indeed, a lot of counters in BW were soft counters, so not every match up went by the rock papers scissors. The whole lurker vs infantry, muta vs infantry, storm vs anything, scourge vs muta, or corsairs vs muta micro show is one of the bigger displays of this. Sc2 counterparts are like thor vs muta and marines vs banelings. It seemed like the BW pros had a knack for making impossible things happen, and constantly changed what we thought was the proper way to play.
"There's no way you can engage MM directly with mutas"
"You have to 2 gate vs zerg"
"Fast expanding in TvZ is suicide"
"Get a hive in 9 minutes against Terran? Noob!"
"Carriers and corsairs against zerg? The fuck you smoking?"
"Only a noob would rush to arbiters"
Will SC2 ever have something like this 10 years from now? Hopefully. Well, I think Blizzard just needs to soften up on the nerf bat a bit more. (Keep in mind after 2001, there were no more balance changes-- people said that it took years and years to balance BW are full of shit)
As a side note, are the pro games being held on battle.net? There's more latency that way.