AT-43 Unit review: Therian assault goliaths

Meet the new bad boys of physical comedy... .larry, .moe, and .curly!

Seriously though, the assault goliaths are the latest addition to the Therian army and one that I just had to buy as soon as I saw them. They just look too cool in my opinion! Then again looks are not everything (even in a miniatures game), so the real question is how do they play? I recently had a chance to find out firsthand.

The game that we played featured the Therians against an alliance of Karmans and the Red Blok. With the way that the units moved onto the board my Goliaths wound up being paired off against the strider-heavy RB faction, in particular a Sierp and Urod. Once they were able to move into a position that they could draw line-of-sight, they opened up on the Sierp but honestly they were not very effective. It's armor was too high for the sonic cannon to be effective and though the nucleus gun was able to inflict some damage, it was not enough to really make much of a difference before all of the goliaths were destroyed by a barrage of fire from Urod.

A dismal first performance for them but I think that it is largely a case of not really being on par with what they had to face. With a strider heavy force such as this, I would have been better off fielding a unit of bane goliaths. The dual nucleus guns that they are armed with would have had a much greater chance of being effective which could have helped swing the battle in my favor.

Still, the question remains: are the assault goliaths worth it? Personally I still think that they are in the right situation. With their mixed armament, they have a versatility that the banes simply don't have against a force with a more balanced mix. For example, when used against units with lighter armor such as infantry the assault goliaths can potentially eliminate 12 targets compared to the 6 that a bane goliath unit will eliminate, enough to seriously cripple even the largest RB squads. It is just against striders that they seem to have some difficulty, though since the last battle did include the near-indestrucible Urod it is perhaps still too early to say.

Overall I would say that the assault goliaths are a nice addition to any army but if you are going to be facing a large number of AFV, you might want to put the points into bane goliaths instead.