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So as i flipped through my Mechanicum rulebook i spent some time looking at the Cyber Occularis entry in the wargear section (p111) and realised that there was an extra bit added to their rules.

They are deployed with the magos they were purchased for, and despite the rules on jetpack infantry and transports they can get into a transport vehicle with the model they were bought for.
Which means you can put 4 of them in a Macrocarid Explorator accompanying a Taghmata Magos/Archmagos, Magos/Archmagos Reductor, or Archmagos Draycavac.

They also have the 'auger sweep' rule which appears to be stackable "enemy units within 12 reduce their cover saves by -1 when fired at by units from the same detachment as the cyber-occularis"
This gives the wonderful effect of driving a tooled-up macrocarid toward the enemy which gives a whopping -4 to enemy cover saves within 12" of it or whatever point on it you choose to measure from.

I use a lot of thallax and that little trick gives me troop-wide ignores cover within those 12" and almost army-wide ignores cover since it turns a 2+ cover save into a 6+....

Also, you can give the macrocarid an 'explorator augury web' which gives it the scout special rule to get it up in the enemy's grille even quicker!
This drops the transport capacity to 8, but thats still enough for an archmagos on an abeyant, 4 cyber-occularis and room for one more.
Of course if you don't get the augury web then you could fit a second magos in there with another set of cyber-occularis for a full-on 'ignores cover' bubble..
Or have multiple macrocarid cover-troll units!

It gets better if you use them like this in an Ordo Reductor army because the Matrix of Ruin makes the Macrocarid a scoring unit when inside the enemy deployment zone and ignores all penalties and restrictions for moving through difficult/dangerous terrain in rubble, ruins, minefields and trenchworks. (i.e. most 30k and 40k terrain)
And if you do this with Calleb Decima as your warlord in an Isstvan 3 campaign then it has 'stealth' for the first turn too.

I hadn't thought about it stacking before, but four seems like overkill. How often do you come across a 2+ cover save?

I'm more interested in them for the line of sight for my Minotaur and artillery battery.

I use them mainly for extra Interceptor and LoS-fun. Or to distort enemy units.

In my 'meta' we have lots of buildings, ruins and fortifications for terrain so when the night-fighting rule comes into effect, everything in terrain has a 3+ cover save or better which i'm hoping to work to my advantage.

I like that they work on more than just the night-fighting rules that an infra-visor does, and i like that it doesn't make the model take blind tests at I1 if i use them.
I know the cyber-familiar allows me to re-roll failed characteristic tests but re-rolling hoping for a 1 doesn't work now i'm not using GW dice.

Man, this is to cover what the Eldar Freak Show is to Leadership.

I don't know much about Mechanicum (nobody I know plays it), and after a bit of reading 1d4chan I honestly can't say how well this would work in the Heresy, but imagine using this in a terrain heavy 40k game.

IMO it's meh. The ETA on the robots and the DS on the Thallaxi is plenty of cover reduction. At 15 points per, for the price of 4 you can get nearly two more thallaxi or half another castellax, and for the price of eight you get a castellax with an ETA.

More bullets forcing more saves, while doing what you can to reduce the saves, is better than reducing all their saves to nil (in very situational conditions; who will let those weak models survive long within rapid-fire range once they learn what they do?) without having any guns to actually do anything about it.

 SirDonlad wrote:

They also have the 'auger sweep' rule which appears to be stackable "enemy units within 12 reduce their cover saves by -1 when fired at by units from the same detachment as the cyber-occularis"
This gives the wonderful effect of driving a tooled-up macrocarid toward the enemy which gives a whopping -4 to enemy cover saves within 12" of it or whatever point on it you choose to measure from.

As a rule of thumb, I don't brand any effect stackable if it's by a rule of the same name.
I.e, Skitarii Vanguard Rad Saturation, as far as I'm concerned, you can only get a -1 toughness out of it, regardless of how many Vanguard squads I have in CC.
I can still manage -4 toughness by using Rad Phage, Rad Furnaces, Vanguard, and Rad Grenades, as despite all having a -1 T debuff, don't use the same special rule for it.

It's like in League with Unique Passives: Passives of the same name don't stack, so I can't get 6 Sheen procs off on one attack.


As for using the Occularis for cover save redux, I'm pretty much always getting stuck in with CC, so it doesn't do much for me in that sense.
Best use I've had with them is taking 4 in my last 10-man Apoc game, letting my team mates control one each to make good use of the bonuses, and passively (and un-suspiciously) getting LoS for my Minotaur, sat in the corner of this 10x2 plate (240" by 48") board.
Just a shame there was only 1 flier on the enemy team this time. Had to deal with 12 last time, could've really done with the Occularis then.

Yeah, I don´t think it stacks with itself. It stacks with other debuffs though...

The wording makes it stackable - "enemy units within 12 reduce their cover saves by -1 when fired at by units from the same detachment as the cyber-occularis"

Each cyber-occularis is treated as a separate unit and cannot be joined by anything; so where the rule states "the cyber-occularis" rather than "a cyber-occularis" it is referring to an individual cyber-occularis rather than any which are in play at that time.
If it was intended to form one big bubble with a single effect overall then it would be worded "any cyber-occularis" to take account for where the area of effect overlaps between two units.


@Buddingsquaw; The skitarii vanguard rad saturation rule states - "while a unit with this special rule is locked in combat with one or more models with this special rule all models in that unit subtract one from their toughness (to a minimum of 1)" - It explicitly states that the effect is the same irrespective of how many other models with that rule are engaged.

The interesting thing about the stacking arrangement you mention is that it can't insta-kill T3 models by entering combat with them because the grenades rely on causing a wound first and the rad-phage rule won't allow the toughness to drop below 1.

I refuse to believe that GW proofread despite this evidence to that effect!