The Ares

MekTek has provided us many additional mechs for our favourite past time. Some of their battlemechs are remakes of older mechs and some are creations of their own. The Issue will concentrate on one of the MekTek creations, the Clan Ares.

Built on the framework of a Vulture, weighing only 60tons, the Ares, as we know it today is possibly ton for ton the toughest mech in the game. It packs 11 tons ferro armour when full and travels at 85kph. The stock load out in my opinion is really goofy, but it is rarely used in stock config.

Stripping the weapons and heatsinks from a stock Ares yields 32tons to play with. The electronics are generally where I start when building a mech so I will cover those offerings first. The Stock config has none but BAP, Jump Jets, LAMS and Enhanced Optics are all offered. I suggest BAP and Jump Jets, LAMS if you think you will be facing a missile happy crew with 2 or more missile mechs.

The Ares offers some pretty nice slots. Each arm has a 3-slot energy and a 2-slot ballistic. On top is a 3-slot missile rack and the nose has a 2-slot omni, reminiscent of the Vulture. However, this omni slot seems much more resistant to enemy fire than that of its framework predecessor. Do not hesitate to load weapons in there.

Many different configs can be made with this slot lay out. You like sniper mechs? Load the JJs, EO and BAP, put an ERPPC in each arm, an ERLL in the nose cone, bump your speed up to 97 and throw on some heat sinks. You have one of the finest snipers in the game. You like to brawl? Drop your speed to 79kph, load up 3 LBX10s and 2 HMLs, ouch! Harassing your game? Load this baby with BAP, JJs, EO, 3 ERLLs and 97KPH with a few heatsinks and fire away, people will soon hate you.

The size and shape of the Ares remind you of a Bushwacker with wings. It takes damage much like the Bushy, mostly the side torsos or arms and missile rack before the CT takes hits. The center torso of the mech is well protected from all angles except from the rear. Straight on, the nose and missile rack partially block the CT, and from the sides the arms do the deed until blown away.

Specialty armour is rarely needed for the Ares, but it can take it and still take a devastating load of armament. This mech has many uses; there is no one specific use for it. It can fill any role and do its job well.

Weakness you ask? Yes it has a couple, maybe three. The Legs are obvious targets and are usually targeted because they can be blown off easier than a CT kill. From the back, it is possible to get direct hits on the CT and take this thing down.

Vettie’s View on the Ares? Personally I think that in its current state the Ares is the toughest mech in the game. It’s small and hard to kill. It packs a big can of whoopass and can hit you from anywhere on the battlefield. It can brawl, harass, snipe, support, hell, it can do missiles. It has speed and jump jets. It is an offensive powerhouse. It CAN be killed, but usually has claimed a victim or two before it is brought down. I don’t use the Ares much in the opens because I haven’t spent the time to learn the mech. Trust me, you can’t just take one into battle and expect to kill 2 or 3 enemies and not be killed. People see an Ares and they go after it, 2 or 3 together. The Ares takes a lot of punishment while dishing out plenty, but it cant stand up to 2, or 3 or more mechs pounding it, but then again, not many, if any can. I rate this mech at 4 ½ to 4 ¾ minutes. Probably the highest rating I will issue.


The Ares MP3 Style

The MP3 version of the Ares is a bit different from the previous incarnation. The MP2 version was smaller in size and thus, it was harder to hit. If I remember correctly, the speeds were different as well. What I mean by smaller in size is that MekTek actually made the mech a little bit bigger. If any of you have ever worked with photos or pasting something in a word document or spreadsheet then you will understand what they did. Simplistically put, they dropped a ‘photo’ (model of the mech) in the game, ‘grabbed’ the corners and stretched it a bit to make it closer in size to that of other heavy mechs or other 60 tonners. That was one of the things that made the MP2 Ares so hard to kill, the shape of the mech and it was small so the hit boxes were small.

The current speed range is 73 to 115Kph. Not quite as fast as it once was, I think 121Kph was the MP2 top speed (I could be wrong). This is another factor in removing the ‘uberness’ of this mech, its simply not as fast as it once was.

The slots didn’t change, 1 2-slot Omni in the nose, 1 2-slot ballistic in each arm, 1 3-slot energy in each arm, and a 3-slot missile rack near the head. The Missile Rack and I think the nose Omni slots are specials. This gives them almost ‘add-on’ features and I think it is good and bad. The good is that ‘specials’ are almost like free weight, not exactly, but close and that specials have their own armour hit value. The bad part of this is that you can not change that armour value in any way. Once the slot has received its damage value it gets blown off along with any weapons that were in the slot. There is (more a less) a formula MekTek uses to determine the armour value of a special slot and it varies with the size of the slot, the location and the size of the mech the slot is being applied too. Way to complex for me, other than to say the Ares specials are in line with other mechs.

If you fill the mech with Ferro Armour gives you 33.5tons to work with. The Ares is tough enough with Ferro armour, so, in my opinion, there is no need for special armour. Filling in the electronics, BAP, Jump Jets and enhanced optics still yields 27.5 tons for weapons and speed. Bumping the speed to 91kp gives you 24.5 tons for weapons. 91Kph seems to be a very good speed for the Ares. 24.5 tons COULD hold 6 UAC2s, or 2 ERPPCs and a Lt PPC or 3 ERLLs, or 1 Arrow T-Bolt and 2 ERLLs or well the list goes on. The numbers of options are many and the potential to build a mean killing machine is there.

The Ares is a fine jump sniper. Its profile and body shape make it a hard target to hit. The torsos seem to shrug damage as this thing continues to come at you, or fade away from you and still hit you at the same time. I have seen the MP3 version get knocked over more than I ever remember the MP2 version picking itself up off the ground. I pay that to the fact that the body is a bit larger and a little easier to hit and that there is no LAMs available to it now.

At one time, early MP2 days, the Ares was almost indestructible. I remember a drop in NBT the night before MekTek was to release a patch that adjusted the hit boxes on the Ares to ‘bring it in line’ with other mechs. The map was Spaceport (not the siege map)but for the life of me I can not remember who we were playing. These guys took 6 Ares and 2 50 ton mechs. Needless to say, the match was over very quickly and The Blood Pearls did not come out the winners.

That showed me that some groups were more about winning and exploiting known flaws than they were about playing the game. In fact, the patch was already out, but Dark Phoenix was not going to implement the patch into NBT until the next day. Our match had been scheduled for sometime so we played it knowing that the next day something about the Ares would be different. We did not know they guys we were playing would take all Ares into the match.

Later, after the patch, The Blood Pearls set out on a quest to steal 100 Ares and build our own factory, an Ares factory. In NBT, you had to salvage, trade, buy or steal 100 chassis of any mech that was not your technology in order to have your own factory producing that mech. We were an IS Pirate class team, so Clan Tech was ‘foreign’ to us. Factories cost LOTS of C-Bills to build and you had to pay for light class, then medium class and so on. The Ares is a heavy class so we had to, in effect, pay for a light class factory and then 2 upgrades to produce the mech and you could only do this AFTER you had captured enough of the chassis.

This put us on a crusade. We raided Clan after Clan and several IS Houses in search of the Ares. Hacksaw took half the jumpship forces and I took the other half as we entered the K-Cluster. He went east and I went west, launching various attacks on the different clans. After plenty of raids, disruptions and thefts, along with some special deals, the Blood Pearls were the 1st and ONLY Pirate unit to have an operating factory producing Clan Heavy Class chassis. Yep we had our own Ares factory.

The MP3 version of the Ares is much easier to kill than its debut version. But it is still very hard to put down. There are some pilots that can pilot thing mech exceptionally well and, in their control, it seems even tougher. I have always had respect for the Ares, but I have rarely piloted one.

I rated this mech before MP3 as one, if not THE toughest mech in the game. That has changed since MP3 but it is still one of the toughest mechs in the game. The size, height, body shape, speed, and I am sure there are other elements I havent considered or covered that combine to make this mech good. My original rating was 4 ½ to 4 ¾ minutes. That has gone down, but not too far. The Ares still rates 4 minutes.