Warning: Some Spoilers
TL;DR Series started tanking at the end of book 1. Many unnecessary simple physics problems ie Nick's ramming fetish.
I heavily debated between two and three stars and wish I could give it 2.5 and settled with a 2, just couldn't round it up. There were multiple times I wanted to put this book down, but made myself power through it.
I've got a whole host of problems with Victory. Overall, there is a noticeable change in tone between book 1 and books 2 and 3. I realized what I enjoyed about book 1 was the near wholesale pillaging of BSG with its gritty tone and substance expressed in Nick's competent writing and style. What followed, and was more clearly Nick's own creation, fell short. Book 1 had a gritty realistic feel to it with a universe where things like Q-jump recharge speed mattered, distances mattered, etc.
But, in books 2 and 3 that changed. I'm guessing there was no plan for post book 1 and when it was a success there was a mad rush to publish more. Nick just started hand waving away all the problems his lazy and simplistic plot created which naturally created bigger problems which required more abusive fiat. So many things that are always way too convenient and contrived and flat out not believable. It fell a long way from book 1, which I enjoyed, and there is no way I'd risk my time on a book 4. Every problem gets a bigger and more unrealistic explanation. And don't even get me started on his ramming fetish...
Physics matters and there is not a reason to lazily ignore the easy stuff. First, ramming. Ramming moving objects in space will not be easy. Ramming things accurately, while explicitly doing it manually, is going to be effectively impossible especially precision scraping flybys of moving enemy ships. Dogfighting with double your mass is going to be a huge hindrance, and how the hell are you accurately flinging those osmium bricks into specific parts of enemy ships. Oh, and if just flinging a couple tons of mass at something works, does doesn't the swarm do that... it's stated they can travel at .5C, so a 2 ton osmium brick at .5C has energy equivalent to over 5,000 Megatons. Oh, and launching those couple tons of osmium bricks at ~50kps does not result in ~100Megatons of energy, it's actually .0006 Megatons. So.... that's awkward, its over 100,000 times less energy than you said it was. Fact checking that literally took about one minute, so there is no excuse for it. So, when the Superdreadnought was destroyed by flying osnium bricks... they would have damaged it but it wouldn't have been too bad at all. And lets not forget that their ability to rapidly accelerate to a fraction of C ie move out of the way of bricks was assured, or that they could have q-jumped away. Hell, when you can accelerate quickly to 150,000 kps, moving a couple of kilometers out of the way of manually aimed bricks traveling at 50kps isn't that hard to imagine.
Throughout the whole series there has been serious issues with velocities and distances. In book 1, things like distance mattered. Remember the Constitution moving along for a week at in system speeds and needing acceleration and deceleration phases. In later books, none of it mattered and everything just got hand waved away. It was sloppy. Look at his final entry into the black hole, assuming an orbital distance similar to earth and the sun(underestimate compared to a binary system with a blackhole) and the fastest speed a ship like the Constitution had gone, a blazingly fast 50kps, it would have taken him over 800 hours to have reached the black hole. It was described as happening in minutes. Oh, and the mag rail guns which fired slugs sooooooo fassssssttttt at "a couple dozen" kps were still being used. This is the kind of thing that just didn't need to be there. Just describe a Q-jump to the event horizon and be done. Can we talk about the emergency pods launched at that extreme velociety, ie too late to avoid the event horizon, would have well continued right on into it too. This is similar to the "tactics" used previously where a fleet was split and flew an orbit around the planet in a surprise attack. Its like Nick doesn't understand (Pie x Diameter)/Velocity. Speeds and distances just don't make sense when used, its like Nick never bothered to even conceptualize these things.
Everyone just shows up exactly when and where they need to. Even the final battle, everyone arrived at the same time despite distance or the forcefully reiterated laws of how Q-jumping around works. Sure, you're going to have some of this willing suspension of disbelief in fiction, especially space opera/military scifi, but seriously, there is such a thing as too much.
Let's not get started on the ridiculous politics and intrigue situations. I mean, the whole Isaacson killing Malakov thing... ok, so the super secret base with meta space signal disruptors run by the Russians with years of experience and even a secret metaspace transponder ie naked Russian in a tank, they fail to acknowledge at all that somehow those disruptors are being disrupted by Isaacson(super powerful and somehow accomplished by tiny implants???), and no one notices? Not even a little? The whole thing is just so ridiculous and contrived, it was painful to read. And of course, as was Nick's pattern in these books he continually doubled and tripled down on his style of escalation.
IMO, if you want this series to be great, pretend you've never seen Battlestar Galactica and stop reading book 1 when Granger sacrifices himself. Amazing book. Done. Everything that came after got worse and worse and worse. It got so bad I didn't feel for Grander when he finally actually did sacrifice himself, it just had no effect.