Caves of Qud – Esper Against Robots (Useful Tips)

Fight Tips Against Robots

Cooking with congealed blaze could give you pyrokinesis. Robots usually have 25% resistance against heat/cold, but it can still do a lot of damage. You could also try your luck with hoarshrooms or convalessence for cyrokinesis, but both of those have other cooking domains and can need a lot more rolls to get what you want. Freezing enemies also sets their DV to -10, so then your low agility matters less and that also can increase the chance of all 3 ticks hitting the enemy.

Arcwinders can still hit enemies if they are close to walls or similar due to arcing, but you need to be close enough to not shoot into some random direction. Grenades work pretty well on most characters, but that depends on how low your strength exactly is so you can actually throw them more than 3 tiles. Deft throwing is a good skill to have. Grenade launchers can work if enemies are close to walls or similar, but are generally pretty bad accuracy wise.

You can also use that high ego to get a follower that kills robots for you.

Although Robots tend to come with fire and frost resistance, Flaming/Freezing Ray and Pyro/Cryo Kinesis are viable options for dealing with them even when they have high AV. They’ll resist the damage and temperature change, but only Leering Stalkers/Chrome Pyramids are really buff enough to be able to withstand a true Esper’s elemental assault. Spacetime Vortex lets you whisk them away to never be seen again (although this naturally does not count as killing them), and Temporal Fugue can let you overwhelm them.

In terms of tech options – a Ganglionic Teleprojector lets you dominate robots, although the domination check is STRICTLY level-based and does not benefit from having a high Ego. There are numerous weapons with penetration that scales with Ego, but none of them actually work against robots afaik.

Barring everything else, getting some weapons with electrical damage, a vibro-weapon, or both might help in dealing with them. Arc-Winders, in particular, might be a good fallback option since even without ANY agility investment they are fairly good and completely ignore AV.