Howdy and welcome back to Mech Overview! This week we are taking a look at a mech named after Victor Davion, no not that one, the Victor. The Victor is allegedly a support mech that supports its buddies by jumping into the middle of everything, screaming, and creating the most chaotic fight possible. Victors thrive in rough terrain, limited visibility, and all sorts of non-ideal scenarios where other assault mechs might struggle. At a weight of 80 tons and having a sizable and intimidating model, Victors are designed to draw attention away from lighter assets and redefine a conflict to be all about them. It is appropriate that a stereotypically Davion assault mech would be prone to prima donna behavior, it suits them.

Such a nice looking model. Real “I am coming to beat your ass to death” energy in a way that a lot of other assault mechs lack. There is some really good dynamism in the posing that, once again, really suits this attention-hungry asshole of a mech.

Chassis

The Victor is, as mentioned, an 80 ton assault mech. It sets itself apart from the competition with a few things that are shared between more or less every variant. For one, Victors are nearly always loaded up with a large ballistic weapon in the right arm, with only one variant I can think of without double checking breaking from that pattern. Jump Jets are also nearly universal, with most Victors moving 4/6/4 or better. This mobility does come at a cost though, with Victors trending towards thin armor and mediocre backup weaponry. As a non-omni, Victor variants can make substantial changes to the internal layout and structural components of the mech, though most stay pretty close to the basic pattern.

Variants

These mechs have all been reviewed based on a standard F through S scale, which you can find described on our landing page here (along with all of our other ‘mech reviews, the name of the box you can buy to get any of the mechs we have covered, and our general methodology).

VTR-9B

We are breaking from our usual habit of covering everything in Alphabetical order to first talk about the base pattern Victor, the 9B. The 9B is a 4/6/4 80 tonner with thin but not pathetic armor, enough to take an AC/20 hit anywhere but the arms and avoid crits. At 1378 BV this is a bargain bin assault mech, coming in at sub BNC-3E prices due to how poor the durability is. The guns are why you choose a Victor though, with an AC/20, 2 medium lasers, and an SRM-4. An AC/20 on a jumping chassis for below 1400 BV is pretty decent, though the 9B really has to be used with finesse. You lack the armor for an extended slugging match, and lack the ranged firepower to strike back against Clan assholes stabbing you from way over there. I really enjoy running 9B’s as trash assaults in a force that could use an intimidation piece that doesn’t have the BV for anything better. I also don’t have a Banshee painted up in Kuritan colors yet, so this mech slots nicely in to that role in that force.

To make the best use of this mech into more prepared enemies who are less likely to mess up and let you jump next to them, find the biggest hill or stand of trees on the map and prowl around it out of line of sight and try to bait the enemy into trying to take that position. Putting some sort of sniper that is theoretically vulnerable up close, like an Awesome, on that hill should bring enemy strikers up to you. Once they close in, you can jump on them while dancing and firing the AC/20 as much as possible. It won’t work every time, but even if it doesn’t the Victor is acting as a deterrent and bodyguard for some sort of firebase, which is, in fact, exactly what it is designed to do as a support mech.

I am of the opinion that the 9B, and the general Victor design ethos as a hyper-short ranged, low speed but high mobility “support” mech, is very potent if used correctly and just works so much better than you would think in practice.

RATING: B

VTR-9A

Meanwhile this one is shit. We cut the armor down to Loki-levels, which is completely unacceptable on a close range low speed mech like this. It also does that to fit 2 flamers and a machine gun, because Infantry Guy got his start designing Victor variants in the 2500s. It is cheaper at 1236 BV, but like, come on, if you want a less durable AC/20 just save a bit more BV and bring a Hunchback.

RATING: F

VTR-9A1

This one splits the difference between the 9A and 9B, carrying the same actual guns as those mechs and only having 2 machine guns instead of a machine gun and 2 flamers. It has slightly more armor than the 9A, but it is still shit. Just bring a 9B, if you are really scared of infantry bring a Javelin or a Firestarter or some shit, and stop shaking, the infantry can’t hurt you here. They aren’t real, Hanse Davion made them up to scare you. Sleep well little Victor Pilot, dream of Capellan civilian casualties and blatant power-grabs done to impress your teenaged wife. Everything will be ok, you are too anglo-coded to fail in the long run.

RATING: D-

VTR-9D

The 9D is one of the few early advanced tech refits that isn’t completely idiotic due to a visit from the good idea fairy. 1717 BV is a big increase, but the 9D gains a fair bit of armor, not a ton (actually literally exactly one ton) but enough extra to be noticeable, and trades the guns out for a gauss rifle, 2 medium pulse lasers, and an SRM-4. This changes the mech from a point blank hitman who has to play around terrain and bait enemies in to a mech that can use its jets to get into a good sniping position to start laying in gauss fire, while still having decent close range backup.

This isn’t the best designed gauss truck out there, most medium mechs that carry one are a bit better, but it has enough armor to stand up to some light counter fire and the mobility is genuinely good. It also has CASE and a standard engine, so in practice it just does not fucking die. This is functionally a fat Panther, which isn’t a terrible thing to be. I haven’t used nearly as many 9Ds as I have used 9Bs, but it has a place and is so much more functional than most of the other late 3040s assault mechs it shares a historical context with.

RATING: C+

VTR-9K

The 9K is literally the exact same as the 9D, this is a lore version that just varies in where the components are sourced from, with different models of Gauss Rifle and MPL. That is pretty cool actually, even though it is statistically identical. I love little setting things like this, even if it doesn’t actually mean anything. I generally use this one when I run one of the pair, just for funzies.

VTR-9Ka

Hey kid have you ever tried crack? Would you like to?

The 9Ka is one of the most deranged mechs in the game in terms of just sheer befuddlement at who came up with this record sheet and why. It is beautiful, it is terrible, it is simple and yet it is complex. It wants to get the bugs out of its skin, there are worms beneath the surface, it feels them and it burns at the myriad of gods creatures that rip away at it with their needle-teeth. At 1594 BV the Ka is a bit more expensive than a 9B while having a similar role. It moves 4/6/5 with the use of improved jump jets, which is fucking awesome from a TMM perspective because of how much better +3 is than +2. For weapons we have an AC/20 and a medium laser and literally nothing else. Other weapons were triaged, what are you, weak? It has an AC/20, and that was enough for generation on generation of Davion warriors. The extra laser and SRM pack just encourage weakness and under-reliance on the grand glory that is the autocannon. All hail the Autocannon, may its report deafen us with its heavenly bark, its muzzle flash drive us to blindness at its beauty, and the recoil impact tear our very nerves off so we may never feel any lesser sensation. I see the faces of angels in the path of the tracers and hear in the loading mechanism the music that soothes the heart of mighty Azathoth, lord of light. Ia Ia!

Also it has 6 tons of ammo in the side torso, so it is a complete bomb that is visible from orbit when it cooks off. This does let it carry 12 shots of precision ammo, and it should. 12 shots is enough, the 9Ka will only grace us with its presence for a short time, so very short. I have yet to have one survive to the end of a full length game, they burn bright and burn fast. Hold it back and use it like a 9B, but when it comes time for its glorious attack to begin it is just a lot harder to hit and will hit very often due to precision. No opponent wants to be anywhere near this thing if they are smart and realize what it can do, but if you are allowed to get this into the middle of an enemy lance or formation it can rip and tear in a horrific orgy of violence, slamming 20 points of damage into things while being surprisingly hard to hit and bouncing all over the fucking place, free as a bird. Genuinely a deranged mech for only true believers, some would say cultists. It has come to free us from sin and lesser assault mechs with “restraint” and “dignity” and “battle plans”.

Real Davion patriots thrive in blood, guts, fire, and chaos. Simply collapse your opponents carefully constructed game plan with an 80 ton shithead with no respect for her own life, an AC/20, and exactly enough movement to prevent people from getting away easy.

Ia Ia, gaze upon it. Print the sheet, play it heavily, crush your enemies and offer them up on the altar. The Victor rises like the moon, and the 9Ka is its herald.

RATING: B+, its great if you can position it correctly but it struggles on flat terrain or more open maps, and an opponent who actually respects it will usually be able to avoid it, but when you get to slam this into an unprepared formation it does hilarious damage.

VTR-9S

The 9S is a 9B that trades 1 ton of armor to upgrade the SRM-4 to an SRM-6. I mean if that is what you are into. It fails the AC/20 test and goes boom faster, so I am not a huge fan. Still cheap though.

RATING: C+

VTR-10D

The 10D is a more obvious upgrade of the 9B, significantly thickening the armor and upgrading the weapons. At 1894 BV it is a bit pricey, but the weaponry is pretty great. It carries an Ultra AC/20 that can hit twice if you get lucky, 2 ER medium lasers, and a streak SRM-4. There is one massive and obvious issue with this mech, which is that the right torso has 7 tons of ammo in it with literally no other crits. Any crit to the right torso will blow off the side instantly in a hilarious fireball. It does have CASE, so it won’t instantly die, but as the streak ammo and the UAC ammo are both in that right torso it will lose nearly all of its firepower if that ammo bomb gets touched off. I personally find this much weaker than the 9Ka or even the 9B due to the higher price coupled with the ammo exploding issues. It can perform well and if you just keep presenting your left side and getting lucky you can avoid right torso crits for a bit longer.

I am particularly torn here because on the one hand, objectively this isn’t great for the price, but also in my personal experience I have seen this mech used very well. It just needs to be played with restraint and tact, being held back out of sight until it can get a good jump in and start messing things up. Just treat it like a more expensive 9B and it’ll sometimes land both shots with the UAC/20 and make you laugh like a lunatic as you dump a pair of 20 damage hits into someone.

RATING: C+

VTR-10L

An upgrade to the -9D, the -10L swaps from medium pulses to ER medium lasers, adds a third, and bumps the SRM launcher up to 6 tubes. The gauss rifle stays the same, but some additional staying power is picked up with an extra ton of ammo and a maximum load of stealth armor. This plays pretty much the same as the 9D, using the 4/6/4 mobility to get in place for good shots with the gauss rifle, while the ER medium lasers let you bring in your secondary battery a little more easily. The stealth armor plays into that role well, as you’re a lot harder to hit if you can stay at long range, however it also pushes this up to 2,279 BV. That’s about a 30% increase over the -9D for comparable firepower.

Rating: C+

VTR-10S

The -10S doesn’t feel very much like a Victor as it’s dropped the characteristic jump jets, using an XL engine and endo-steel internals to give it a relatively huge weapon payload. Rather than the rather boring loadouts that only carry a single gauss rifle, this carries both the regular gauss and a heavy gauss rifle. Lots of gun, but also a lot of vulnerability. Most of the right arm is the gauss rifle. If it gets crit, it does 15 structure damage – that goes internal on your right torso. Almost all the right torso is a heavy gauss rifle, with the rest of it being an XL engine. If the HGR gets crit, you take 25 structure damage, knocking off your side torso and killing the mech. Now, that’s not a huge chance, as confirming the side torso crit is roughly a coin flip, but it’s not infrequent either. It’s about an 8% chance that the entire mech dies when you take any structure damage to the right arm, and a 30% chance that the mech dies when it takes any structure damage to the right torso. At 2,034 BV, this is too expensive for something that has an entire half of the mech that actively wants to stop existing.

Rating: D+

VTR-11D

Oh hey its the one with the minigun! The 11D costs 2,021 BV, way too much, and breaks from the standard of Victors by not having a really big boom stick. Instead, the right arm is carrying a rotary AC/5, the traditional left arm medium lasers are upgraded to ER larges, and the SRMs are now streak SRMs. A RAC/5 is a fine weapon, when it’s pretty much alone – here, where you’re spending BV on the ER larges, you have a significant chunk of mech that won’t be doing anything if/when the RAC jams. Inner sphere ER larges are also just not a great weapon, at 12 heat for 8 damage they’ve required this variant to pack on 15 double heat sinks to manage heat load. It’s not a total disaster, and will put out pretty decent damage, but it’s not reliable damage and will scatter it across the enemy mech.

Rating: C

VTR-12D

Another relatively simple upgrade to the -9D, the -12D runs a gauss rifle, pair of medium re-engineered lasers, and an SRM 4. Pretty much the exact same loadout, the upgrades here primarily being to internals – it’s picked up a targeting computer and heavy duty gyro, using a light engine to free up weight. I’m not a big fan of heavy duty gyros. They can take an extra crit before you’re crippled, but especially on a mech this weight there are better options for increased gyro durability – a standard gyro that’s been armored would save 39 BV and be more durable, as now the same location has to be crit twice before anything happens, or it could swap to a compact gyro and save 48 BV, reducing the number of crittable gyro locations to two. Both those options would also leave two free tons that could go into more armor or upgrading the SRMs. If you really love a protected gyro you could run an armored compact gyro, which is still saving on both BV and weight over the heavy duty gyro.

At the end of the day, at 1,935 BV this costs 218 BV more than the -9D, has similar durability (what’s gained in gyro durability is lost in having a light engine instead of standard), and is more accurate. It’s a wash.

Rating: C+

VTR-C

It’s a -9D/-9K that trades a heat sink that it doesn’t really need for a c3 slave. BV remains identical at 1,717.

Rating: C+

VTR-Cr

Swapping the gauss rifle out for a hyper-velocity AC/10 gives this Victor a weapon with slightly worse range than the gauss rifle, less damage than a gauss rifle, an inability to use special ammo like a normal AC/10 would have, and the ability to roll a two and promptly blow the gun up doing a 10 point ammo explosion (including two pilot hits). 1,465 BV is pretty cheap but you couldn’t pay me to take this over a -9B.

Rating: F

Victor C

Different from the VTR-C, the Victor C is a clantech refit. It’s running a gauss rifle, pair of clan ER medium lasers, and clan streak SRM-4, which makes it very comparable to the VTR-9D. However, it uses those weight savings to carry more heat sinks, which it didn’t really need, while remaining armored like a -9B instead. At 1,925 BV this is just worse at carrying a gauss rifle around than a -9D, even if the secondary weapons are all better.

Rating: C

VTR-9B (Kataga)

An XL engine is used to bump armor up to near-max, as well as freeing the weight for some significant weapon swaps. The primary gun is the common gauss rifle, but the SRM rack is entirely gone, traded for a pair of large pulse lasers. While IS large pulses are short ranged, they’re still accurate with good damage, and this variant has the heat sinking to fire everything with no concerns. 1,991 BV is getting up there, but this is a very competent upgrade to a -9D due to a much stronger secondary battery that it can make effective use of.

Rating: B

VTR-9B (Shoji)

Without using an XL engine this variant manages to carry max armor, instead trading the AC/20 for an AC/10, and bumping the lasers up to a trio of medium pulses. Two tons of ammo for the AC/10 means that one can easily be precision ammo, so this turns into an effective bully of smaller mechs, especially as it only costs 1,531 BV.

Rating: B

VTR-9B (Li)

Someone turned a Nova into a Victor and I don’t like it. It’s got an LRM 15 with a single ton of ammo and 10 medium lasers packed into a single arm (which it can’t flip because the other arm still has all its actuators). 19 single heat sinks is laughably insufficient for that many medium lasers, and this hasn’t increased the armor at all. 1,625 BV puts this very nearly the cost of one of the gauss equipped victors, and while this has a staggering alpha strike it’ll spend the next turn barely able to walk or hit anything. You have to hope that wherever you are has something within 4 hexes to block line of sight that you can jump back over while you cool down, as otherwise it shoots once then dies.

Rating: C-

VTR-9K2 (St. James)

This last variant is running two medium x-pulse lasers and a long tom cannon at 2,003 BV. It’s well armored and with a standard engine, running a supercharger instead of jump jets for a 4/6(8) movement profile, which makes this one of the most mobile long tom cannon units in the game, just beaten out by a few aerospace fighters. A long tom cannon is not the full up artillery piece – it’s not shooting across multiple mapsheets, but it is still a 20 damage area effect weapon. It’s a tremendous way to get rid of pesky high mobility targets or battle armor, as a hit will simply evaporate an entire squad of elementals at a time.

Rating: C+

Conclusion

Despite starting out with some true trash in the succession wars (the 9A and 9A1 are garbage mechs that you should never put on the field), as long as the Victor is sticking to a simple formula of a big gun, some support weapons, and above average mobility for its size it does well. When it avoids that it tends to fail, but on average there are more OK variants than bad ones.

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