What happens to your elitist skill-based dismissal of disagreeance when I agree with those above me? I’m already on record for saying this, the IKV-103 is not a good tank.
It’s advantages are its great speed and manueverability, its high pen round, and its gun depression. As for the disadvantages, well, its everything else.
The advantages of speed and manueverability are completely gimped by it’s poor gun handling, poor velocity and poor reload. You cannot position aggressively due to how easy it is to be pushed in it, both due to the long time between shots and the amount of time it takes to get the gun on target when being pushed. While the low velocity means you cannot position it for sniping effectively either. Your advantages in speed mean nothing when you are so incredibly limited on where you can position safely.
It’s armor is ZiS-30 tier. Anything from a .50 cal and up will rip through it, and it’s got a giant hole in the front armor with the gunner peaking his head out, so you aren’t even safe to push breached tanks. This also means it counts as “open” as far as overpressure goes, so bombs and artillery are extreme threats even if they don’t land close to you.
Then there’s the firepower itself. 400mm of pen usually won’t let you down, but the post pen sure will. This when combined with the fairly low velocity making accurate shots at mid/long range difficult, the poor gun handling which makes getting those accurate shots on aware enemies take far longer than usual, and the longer reload making followup shots on wounded opponents more risky. Plus, a personal gripe, no coax, meaning you’re even more vulnerable to being rushed by truck based SPAAs, and you’re severely limited on urban maps by fences and the like blocking your shots.
The only position I could get it to work is sitting behind a hill at mid range against distracted enemies. You can then use your absurdly good gun depression to get a shot on them and quickly reverse out of the line of fire to reload safely. You can even lob shots over cover in the absolute perfect scenario. This only really works until an opponent is made aware of you (Say, by one of your rounds hitting but not crippling them). Then you’re mostly just stuck. Even if their attention is split, unless you have someone else actively pressuring them, it takes so long to get your gun on target that even if they need to swing back to you they’ll often have the time. Map dependant, you can try to reposition, but spots like these are rare (If they even exist at all), so you’re often stuck to a few predictable locations.
Just about anything you can do in the IKV-103, you can also do with the two Pvkvs at the same tier, with their higher velocity guns also allowing them to also snipe effectively on top of this weird hulldown ambush playstyle.