What to do against Skytoss?

as I’ll inevitably be behind in the transition.

Then he's behind due to the transition too. This is where you're making the mistake. Skytoss vs groundtoss is usually going to go very badly for the groundtoss once you're both at the same amount of supply. The trick is to punish him if he tries to go carriers. Think of what he has to invest to get them - stargates, fleet beacon, the cost of the carriers themselves, the carrier upgrade (if he gets it). It's not just the resources, but the ridiculous amount of time he has to spend on them.

I read somewhere that stalkers are okay against carriers

Any time you're massing stalkers, you're probably going to lose. 10, 15 at a time, max. Unless you're just goofing off or doing something very funky. Supply for supply, mineral for mineral, Stalkers aren't going to beat Carriers. But against 1-2 carriers? You should win with those 10-15 Stalkers.

En taro InControl

High Templar storms can buy you decent time to tech up and keep them if the enemy sticks with carriers. Carriers are a rich mans unit and the interceptors cost money to rebuild. If you get good storms on the interceptors then the carriers become useless for a short time while they rebuild interceptors. He’s losing money remaking interceptors. Also scout it early and apply heavy ground pressure to try and kill him before that critical mass of carriers. Win game.

Take this with a grain of salt, but you can beat someone starting to mass carriers with a ground-based army, as long as you don't let it get too out of hand (at least in low platinum, anyway). Once you know he's got a fleet beacon, you're kind of on a time limit with a ground-based army. You might get one or two shots to kill him, but eventually I think the air army will win out. I've generally been following the Vibe build lately, going with Stalkers > Colossi > Archon > Max the rest of the way with Zealots, so I usually have some combination of those units depending on what I've scouted.

One game in particular, we had butted heads a couple of times with ground armies when I spotted a carrier or two mid-game. I naturally had a ton of gates and 2-0-1 ground upgrades or something because of the build, so I decided to start massing archons instead of making the transistion. I think by the time I attacked him, he had six or seven carriers with a small ground army at a cannoned-up base. I had probably eight or nine archons, added blink stalkers for targeting down the carriers, and let my remaining chargelots work on his ground army and cannons.

Going into the attack, I let my archons go after the interceptors (splash damage) and used the stalkers to target-fire the carriers themselves. Once the interceptors were gone, the archons target the carriers and it was over.

Not sure if that's the best way to go about it, or maybe the timing worked out just right. If you don't feel too far behind when you spot a carrier, maybe just build up a bit more anti-air and go for it.

Also carriers are slow so you never have to fight them them directly. Often times the plan is to avoid direct engagement and hit them where they aint

Since there's no replay I'll have to give a little bit of generic advice.

1. A blink Stalker timing works when you hit before they have mass. Once there's enough pure stalker does not work. You'd need to hit a large blink stalker attack before they can get past (I think 4) Carriers and focus fire the Carriers.

What should I do? I’ve tried also transitioning into Skytoss myself, but feel like this is a bad idea as I’ll inevitably be behind in the transition.

Eh I guess slightly? Assuming you didn't lose so many probes early on and you spot it quickly enough you can still go for it. I would suggest you play defensive under a mass of batteries to add some vitality to your fleet.

You can also play a pure ground comp vs this imo as Carriers really are the only good unit in a Skytoss PvP. Your comp would consist of Blink Stalkers and Archons as your main army. While you use Chargelot runbys to keep his economy in check. You can also have Blink Stalkers roving around to pick off lone Carriers trying to join their main fleet. As for your main army you need them under a lot of shield batteries to outlast the insane DPS Carriers have. You also want maximum shield upgrades so that the Archons can tank a lot more interceptor shots so this is probably one of the only times where double forge would actually work. You want to make it so he's the one that needs to attack as you really don't have much survivability without that mass of shield batteries.

Everything to do with skytoss in PvP is very situational so you cant really make statements like "stalkers are bad" or "carriers are unbeatable". However, since the new tempest changes, they have become a good answer to an opponant who is turtling up and massing carriers. If you get a tempest cloud and an oracle revalation on their army, you can kite his deathball and pick off a carrier every time you shoot. The new carriers also dont launch all their interceptors nsarly as quickly so the initial damage output is less. I was very surprised by this the first time pvp made it to skytoss wars in the new patch.

That being said, there is no reason why skytoss should be easy to since the oracle change. Since oracles are no longer hard countered by pheonix as quickly, pheonix ars are not forced upon us if both players open stargate. Thus we dont get in situations where both players have no ground units and are massing air passively too often unless both players are determined to do so. In a game where one player is building a ground force and the other is trying to make skytoss, the ground player will have a timing to either break the skytoss player or out expand and match him.

What i suggest, is if you have been lazy with your scouting and only discover the skytoss transition late in the game, make sure to out expand your opponant and be mobile with your stalkers. Then tech directly to 4-5 stargate tempest to try and catch up with your opponant. You will want to trade out your stalkers eventually and rely on micro to defeat their army. The only thing with massing tempest is that they are actually vulnerable to mass stalker transitions unlike the carriers and cant actually kill bases that quickly. If your opponant doesnt leave after you pick apart his army, i suggest picking off a nexus or two and kiting his remax while rebuilding an army that can fight it.

Biggest single tip: focus fire the carriers. Your stalkers will focus the interceptors automatically, which will let 2-3 carriers fight an almost infinite number of them if not microed.

Archons are great for eradicating interceptors.

A carrier with no interceptors is useless

PvP normally doesn’t go to late game armies. Normally you just keep hitting each other with mid game armies until one of you makes a mistake, but the exception may be if you were in a phoenix war. If you let them get to carriers you already lost.

Try to play skytoss and see how you are losing.

step 1) Scout skytoss early step 2) Build forge + twilight council if you do not have them already step 3) chronoboost shield upgrade and build templar archives step 4) use all your extra minerals on more bases (you will to mine just the gas) step 5) mass archon sentry.

With guardian shield, +3 shield archons are remarkably efficient at killing interceptors. Ideally you should be able to hit a timing before the skytoss player has a fourth base.

Stalkers beat carriers in small numbers. Otherwise you gotta hit and run with them to kill Econ without losing your army.

HT and Stalkers best Voidrays in most numbers, you’ll need to storm a number of times before engaging and ideally only engage when they’re not using their charged beam.

Stalkers and Archons do okay vs mass Nix, archons can’t get lifted. Ideally you’ll expand more than him because he can’t do any actual damage to your base.

I’m pretty sure like a ton of archons usually wins vs mass carrier. The interceptors melt and take forever to be replaced

You gotta keep constantly trading with his carriers when you realize he is transitioning. Once he gets to a large amount of supply of them is when you are really in trouble.

Against lots of carriers, the best answers protoss has to them are tempests, and perhaps surprisingly, phoenixes. Unfortunately, both of these require micro to be effective, with tempests you want to target fire carriers while staying out of range, with phoenix you want to draw out the interceptors then fly them back so they kill the interceptors and basically keep doing this until all the interceptors are dead, only when all the interceptors die do you kill the carriers themselves with the phoenixes.

As you mentioned you're at gold 1, I would instead suggest to go double forge for weapon+armor upgrades (armor>shields), and either kill him with blink stalkers target firing carriers before the carrier count gets too high, or getting your own carriers.