Smart armour

Smart armours are armours/combat suits that directly influences one's movement through being linked unto their nerve system or similar. Despite them having way greater survival chances on battlefields, most baseline or transhumas cling to the idea "humans in ultimate control" and the use simple exoskeletons or augs. Smart armour can vastly increase even an UnAuged civilian's survival chances in low-g battlefields as it grants both sufficent hardware and combat experience to the user. 
Smart armours are usually limited in their capabilities by waste heat radiation, hardware amount, computing and telemetry limits, and their wearer's physicals (i.e. maximum acceleration they can survive). For this reason, most smart armour's long term acceleration maxes out at 130 m/s'2.
Smart armours are also capable of rapid synaptic scanning and simulation, ergo being able to evacuate one at c or storing for potentially millions of years.
Most smart armours use point defence, optical (OPA, metamaterial) and thermal cloaking instead of direct weapons as most combatants (such as combat drones) can not be matched with a living being limiting dodging windows and survival being their primary goal. Most smart armours, while graphene or similar carbon structure based in nature also have and OPA cloaking layer.
Most smart armours either rely on small amounts of antimatter stored in potential wells or rapidly available chemicals as source of energy due to batteries being short-lived and more damageable by EMPs.
It is worthy to note that no "universal" smart armour exists, due differing anatomies, physiological and metabolical needs and differently segmented muscles or similar. Instead, most multi-species polities employ a range of armours or rely on other, more general defensive methods (Bicameral combat software, defensive goos and Meissner objects).
While smart armour can quickly get a civilian to safety, its combat effectiveness is small compared to most designated hardware. Standard combat drones used by the HighSphere members for instance are much smaller in mass and yet can effectively fight with nearly a hundred smart armours.

"The man barely stumbles into the collapsing hallway and shouts in some-long forgotten dialect only ever heard in pre-CaXit US. Behind him, the weapons fire gets louder and louder, but he was deafened by a grenade a few minutes before, ears giving up to a blast meant to kill him.  Blood spills from his face and his left leg is cracking, weaker by every step. His brain - ridden with whatever prion-based bioweapon - is his smallest setback and it won't hit him for a few months at least. 
He does not see the figure behind him, holding the microwave pistol. He does not see the camera on the cellar, does not hear the alarms rising, he does not see the graphene figure bursting and tearing through the clipboard walls and severing the insurgent's hand. He turns, provoked by some unconscious battle-reflex left untouched and barely catches a glimpse of an armoured hand collapsing into the skull. For a moment he would swear that the thing, bloody, eyeless and all polygons, looks at him. 
Next thing he feels is the warm embrace of the suit and cold needles slipping into his veins, the push of the crown of magnets and synaptic inhibitors into his skulls. The world becomes clear, he hears and sees, telemetry rising around him. His body moves, soft and precise, his left leg still in pain but never put under stress. 
He does not remember the next hours, only glimpses and target acquisitions, crystal clear images in the ocean of blur. Burst of weapons and his own hands swinging and clawing, barehand fights where he never loses his balance.
The armour does most of the work. It censors most of the bloody stuff, the only signal of its deeds' being the growing crimson layer on his hand....."

Access & Availability

Smart armours are typically a post- or mid-singularity tech, and as such, most of the Group either has primitive versions of it. For instance, while HighSphere designs are vastly superior due to near optimal thermal profiles, even the Zobruin-like empires can manufacture their own - way slower and weaker - versions of the technology.

Complexity

Smart armours and their design is mostly focused on the software rather than the hardware itself: for this reason, it requires a deep understanding of combat and medical software designs, game theory and ability to create adaptive recognition software. 
iI any of these fields is lacking, a superior enemy force can either quickly overwhelm or catch the armours, or simply use recognition-abusive weapons against them.