Banshees functions as a powerful air to ground attacker. It replaces the role of the classic Wraith, which had a strong air attack but very weak against ground targets. Banshees do not have a lot of survivability, but their powerful attack makes them useful for hit and run strategies similar to the Reaper's role.
With the Cloaking ability, Banshees are often used for harassing purposes. A common tactic is to send a few Cloaked Banshees behind enemy lines and quickly destroy the enemy's harvesters. Groups of Banshees can deal impressive damage making them nearly unapproachable from the ground.
Cloaking renders the Banshee invisible making it unattackable unless there is a nearby detector. This ability consumes a small amount of Mana, but uses an additional .9 Mana per second while the ability is active. A full Mana bar will let the Banshee Cloak for several minutes. Cloaking is effective for hitting bases with no detectors allowing the Banshees to fire freely. It is also useful for fleeing a battle that is going south allowing the Banshees to get away safely.
This upgrade will reduce the energy the Banshee will consume by 50 percent. A useful upgrade for Banshees that need to remain Cloaked for an extensive amount of time.
Shockwave Missile Battery (Campaign)
Source: Hyperion Armory
Credits: 110,000
The Shockwave Missile Batteries cause the Backlash Rockets to strike additional units behind the primary target. This increases the overall damage of the Banshee when facing groups of mobs lined up properly.
Many experiments with dedicated air-to-ground attack have been undertaken by the terrans. Various dead-end approaches were tried and then discarded: ordnance packages for dropships, remote semi-autonomous drones, and airborne artillery platforms, to name but a few. Such continual compromises eventually led to retrofitting variants of the Wraith space superiority fighter with a belly-mounted burst laser to fulfill the role in the short term. Even so, the abiding problem of finding truly effective air-to-ground support below battlecruiser weight remained.
Procyon Industries has been the latest to tackle the problem by approaching it from a different direction. Instead of attempting to adapt existing aircraft designs for a role they were never intended to fulfill, the technicians at Procyon designed the banshee from scratch. As a planetary craft, the banshee wouldn't need high-powered engines to achieve escape velocity and fight in orbit, so instead technicians fitted it with economical twin turbofans. Any air-to-air weaponry was deemed unnecessary: the banshee would only hunt ground targets. Thus, it was equipped with powerful air-to-ground cluster rockets.
The resulting aircraft was cheap, relatively robust, and well suited to its intended role of making tactical strikes on the battlefield. The banshee was adopted by the Dominion as a light infantry support craft that could be quickly transported to any world. Despite the banshee's many fine traits, Dominion commanders initially derided its apparent inflexibility and relegated banshees to a minor support role in backwater militias.
However, with the benefits of being lighter and much more mobile than a siege tank, the banshee soon gained itself a fearsome reputation in spite of its detractors. It particularly shone as a jungle and desert fighter that could hunt across vast areas of inhospitable terrain and suddenly strike at unsuspecting enemy forces. The surprise attack value of the banshees has been further enhanced by modifications that allow them to mount salvaged Wraith cloaking fields, enabling banshees to hit and run even where the enemy dominates the skies.
As the Dominion conquered additional terran worlds, the banshee was cast into a new role. Guerilla freedom fighters making hit-and-run raids against Dominion forces found themselves hunted by banshees that could respond quickly enough to catch them as they were fleeing to their hidden bases. In recent years the banshee has gained a nasty reputation as a Dominion terror weapon because it has been used more and more often in urban conflicts, where its indiscriminate attacks have killed countless non-combatants.
