I am actually putting my MPS away in my GT world a bit huffily. I have fixes for a few problems, but not all of them, and with these new versions of it's very hard to not just take the easy road and use the Advanced Jetpack/Nanochest combo and those tools. Since this is actually a pretty highly rated google thread for the module, I figured it'd be nice to continue the discussion here. Please not that this advice takes GT-centric config more into account than the IC2 recipes. It also applies a bit more to TE.
Problem 1: The Suit's Batteries are Microscopic!
You can charge an MPS in any IC2, and even LV power sources do a good job of that. That's because the config has a file that says 1 EU = 50J. This seems great, right? Cheap charging! Right... except that any IC2 tools you do will be taking 50x the EU cost from that. One medium-level battery (which uses lapotronic crystals) can hold 500kJ. This is a mere 10000EU, even a humble electric wrench or electric treetap can bankrupt your armor! For direct comparison, this is the size of the feeble internal battery on your Diamond Drill.
You might suggest an upgrade to the battery, but look at the costs for the extreme end capacitors. 6 chrome and 2 lapotronic cryatls. Anyone who's familiar with Gregtech should immediately spit-take; that's an expensive build for armor. It's more expensive than many pieces of quantum armor, and you'll need to manufacture multiples of them! That battery can hold a much huger sum: 10x! So now we're holding a whopping 100000 EU. Fire a mining laser and plummet to the ground like a wounded bird.
Even worse, if you do forego a chestpiece of wear an IC2 chestpiece, if your armor is on the bottom half of your body it'll be sapped before the top due to the MPS mechanics. Since salvaging capacitors seems to never work (I tried it on a testmode server and didn't have it work 10 times out of 10, make sure to make a wise choice.
Solution: There is a config entry "Joules per IC2 EU". As counter-intuitive as this seems; you want to turn this down. Honestly you might even want to bring it below 0 if you want even some sort of parity with the actual cost of what you're sinking in. You drop multiple Lapotronic crystals in a capacitor, you expect something like the EU you put in. I'd recommend setting this to 0.5. This means you'll need more hefty charging resources for your suit.
Problem 2: Even if you change that constant, the tools themselves are sorta costly.
Basically, the maxout point of most of the tools is somewhere around the "Advanced" Gravisuite tools, but their power consumption at those modes is really high. Well before you have any iridium on you, you can have an Advanced Diamond Drill and a cool million EU on your back. But let's say you think GraviSuite's new toolset is OP. Fair enough! Even compared to the basic Diamond Drill it's a tough comparison. A diamond drill can use up to 80 EU per operation. If you're wearing even a basic lappack, you can mine ~3750 blocks before having to recharge. Using ONE of the non-iridium bearing batteries and using a 2/3 overclock (which is about as fast as the diamond drill in my estimation) your 500kJ battery gives you 665 blocks broken, 17.5% percent!. Even if you were to utterly forego armor spend 20kg of your 26kg weight allotment on these batteries,that'd be 1 megajoule and another 2 lapotronic crystals., you'd still be running out of steam at a mere 1330 blocks.
So until you have the maximum battery, the tools are prohibitively expensive to use. Overclocking tem basically ruins your day. So if you do implement my fix for problem 1, the only reason you would't just use the IC2 tools charged off your battery is that you You might want to point out the generators as a counterpoint, but wait a sec on that...
Solution: Welp, you need to go into the config settings and reduce the base costs for the core tools. The exact number? I'm not sure. I'll update this part of the post once I have a better idea. My guidepost is that the 50% overclock should be competitive with the diamond drill and the 100% should be competitive with the diamond drill in terms of speed. A bad way to to fix this is to up the base speed to make lower settings more competitive because you could easily end up with 40x mining speed. Due to the regenerative generator it should be less efficient, but not the less-than-30%.
Problem 3: The Kinetic Generator Does Not Help With Problem 2
Problem 2 is that the tools are too expensive, but MPS has regenerative power. One relatively early solution is the Kinetic Generator. The Kinetic generator is worth its weight in batteries for the leg and foot upgrades; maxing out every movement assist doesn't even offset the power gain by 50%. Amazing, right? But when you do go mining the tool consumes so much energy that you find yourself running back and forth in your branch mines. And the solar panel won't help you here (good luck building it on a GT config though). It seems wrong that the kinetic generator generates huge sums of power on boosted leaps to the point where moving will recharge your suit faster than a Charge-O-Mat.
Solution: This is more for the mod designer to address. In the interim we could increase the cost of the movement skills to come closer to balance with the generation of the kinetic engine, or decreasing the max threshold of the kinetic generator. The config values are straightforward, but I'm not sure what the right call is.
Problem 4: Under Gregtech, the recipes are insanely expensive. Under IC2, they're quite cheap. Under Thermal Expansion, they're gated only on a bit of infrastructure.
There isn't a fix for this. It's just a balance problem. The MPS recipes for IC2 are crazy iron hungry, but any decent automining will enable better-than-gravitysuit results without any iridium and they completely invalidate every other kind of armor in the game. The Gregtech recipes require more chrome than a fusion reactor. It's actually more cost effective to build a Gravity Suit! The net result is pretty amazing, but there is literally no in-between. You either have every bit of speed you want or none of it at all.
I originally fell in love with the mod because it has a power curve. But I confess it feels very haphazard. On my DW20 server, using the MPS turned me into an unparalleled god. I put away a quantum suit for it. On my AdvanceCraft (consider it like Ultimate but with a bit more) server, I've sunk a ton of resources into my suit and I'm underperforming and have to put down my suit a lot.
Solution: There isn't one. Sorry.
