Banshees in 1v1

I'm not sure how this applies to teamgames, but in 1v1, banshees are extremely popular in the current metagame. I've played quite a few 1v1s in the last 1-2 months(around 100 in the last month alone because it's such a fun gamemode) and banshees appear in a disproportionally large amount of games that go on long enough to inhabit tech switches. They are literally THE airswitch unit. Actually, they are overall THE techswitch unit. They are super mobile, have good DPS with decent HP(better HP/cost than brawlers), force your opponent into making AA and punish the lack of it much harder than any planeswitch. Add to that their semi-decent AA capabilities and you get a super generalist unit that is useful to have in almost every game(tiny maps are an exception).

I'm not saying that they are overpowered in the most straightforward sense. But I do feel like their strength is somewhat anti-fun. For me, one of the most enjoyable things about ZK is the plethora of viable strategies/playstyles. I used to play SC2 quite a bit(around 1.5K 1v1s), but eventually, it got stale and boring. The same builds every time, the same responses and the same responses to these responses. That's not really fun. And I feel like the banshee is currently promoting that kind of play.

What if, instead of the gunship factory and banshees being the go-to techswitch, we would have lots of relatively evenly attractive support factory/tech options. So that planes, tanks and spiders(both crabe and infi are pretty amazing as a techswitch in some circumstances) could see a lot more action in 1v1, even just as a second factory. Arguably planes are still ok, but they don't seem to work as well as banshees. Even if a good air player disagrees with me here, for the majority of the playerbase, banshees are more effective due to them being a lot easier to use.

In case somebody is wondering, I'm not looking for counters to the banshee. I know and use them regularily and they have served me well enough. The aim of this thread is to discuss the effect of the current state of banshees on the fun aspect of the 1v1 metagame.

If you already have a decent ground army, banshees give you mobility and firepower on demand. They are awesome units.

Going directly to banshees in the opening is very risky, especially since you can get shut down so hard by anti air. They can be useful on very large maps, especially since opening gunship gets you the Crane for expansion. Also risky, but potentially lets you expand much faster. But still, opening gunships is risky and unstable, so even though Banshees are great you can't really open with them in 1v1.

But as a tech switch, the possibility of making anti-air actually makes your opponent's life harder, not easier. Because every anti-air unit they produce weakens their ground army, and every ground combat unit they produce weakens their anti-air, the presence of Banshees greatly increases the number of weaknesses the opponent has to cover. And you can arrange to attack areas with insufficient anti-air with banshees, and arrange to attack dedicated anti-air with ground units. The banshees can harass and even straight up attack defended positions, while the anti-air is dead weight that weakens their ground army while yours can be augmented by banshee support.

Without question, forcing your opponent to divide their resources between ground and air targets makes their life much more difficult than having a second land factory. I for one vastly prefer Banshees over going for planes for this purpose, due to their low cost and fast speed without being fixed wing. Planes are fast, but hard to keep out of anti-air due to their fixed wing flight patterns.

(putting aside their great mobility and decent hp)
banshees do damage over time, they need to stay at an area for sme secs to harm on kill something.

idea: make them more vulnurable to ground def by slowing their left-right movement and /or turnrate. then make them only shoot forwards. ofc you can micro them still but that should set some limits to their raiding capability.

discuss.

A facswitch should give you acces to new possibilities. Fast moving raiders that take reduced damage from ground units and force your opponent to make AA are a great tool in midgame. Since they don't have to reload, they are much better at raiding lightly defended positions then bombers.
As Saktoth said, banshees are superior when their are (almost) no riots/llt's/felons... Otherwise planes should do great, especially if they can reload closeby. Stilleto's are still the best answer to shieldballs.
switching to another groundfac isn't worth the cost most of the time, since it doesn't give so many new possibilities.

...which is just another way of saying "scouting is really important" :P