Factorio Forums

This may have been asked before, but what equipment line up do you find optimal in your power armour?

Depends what you want to do. I tend to have a bit of a mishmash setup.

It's always nice to have at least one shield if you're playing with enemies. In 0.17 it's more important to dodge spits than to be able to tank damage, so you don't really need more than 3 shields.

At least 2 Exos, up to 6. For combat around 3 Exos seems to be the sweet spot. If you're not going to fight or are just going to lob nukes, then up to 6.

One or two Personal Roboport MK2. You can use more but good luck powering them as the range increases. I prefer to mainly use grid Roboports.

Personal Laser Defense to taste. Having one is nice just to zap nuisances. Up to 6 can work well in combat. Works inside vehicles.

Having a Discharge Defense is quite nice if you're into combat and can be bothered using the remote. It's for the knockback and stun not the damage. Useful mainly if you're into running into nests guns blazing, fairly pointless otherwise. Works inside vehicles.

Night vision optional. Use it if you feel you need it. I often use it for combat but I don't feel much need for it outside of combat. Useful when driving.

Finally the power supply. I usually run with 1 Fusion Reactor and about 6 Battery MK 2, and then I have some extra Fusion Reactors which I swap in temporarily, usually replacing things like PLD. If you can't be bothered swapping fusion reactors, I'd go with 2 Fusion Reactors and maybe 2 Batteries. You do want at least some batteries unless you're doing something weird like using the Personal Roboports really intensively.

I like roboports a bit more. By current building suit has 4 Mk2 with 3 fusion reactors. And 4 exoskeletons

But it's a matter of taste. Plenty of options. For combat you need to make room for shields and some laser defenses

How many fusion reactors and batteries you use also depends on how heavily you use it. You can use less reactors and more batteries if you have only use the power in bursts and wait for it to recharge
I have some slots reserved in the bottom of my inventory and swap equipment as needed

I carry 2 suits with me. One for building, one for general purpose.

Building one has 4 fusion, 4 batteries, a nightvision and the 6 roboports. Works decent enough until the batteries drain. Then I switch out the batteries for solar panels and start mining the bots manually. No exoskeletons needed since I'm usually in a locomotive while using this one, and the build range is pretty big I don't need to move.

General purpose has 3 fusion, 2 exos, nightvision, 2 robos, 2 shields, a PDL and batteries.

3 reactors, 4 better roboports, 3 exoskeletons, nightvision and better batteries to fill. I think it is best building setup possible in vanilla. Unfortunately quite weak. If devs give so much weight on huge megabases in their programming work, in my opinion they should give proper and practical tools to build such bases. Like possibility to run continuously 500 construction bots and better work selection algorithm (few hundred portable bots does not affect to UPS even they work little bit better).

When I go to attack enemies I replace 3 (if I use tank or need repair capability) or all roboports with MK2 shields.

As others said, what activities do you pursue ?
I build, don't combat and run around the map opening it up(and dodging biters)