Personally, I don't have a big plan of attack. I have three desired goals when starting off; a nice pad, increasing ingots per ore block, and a decent farm. I often go with the Macerator because I love using IC2/GT, and the diamonds are a small price to pay, especially when I consider I need to get Macerators for building a Industrial Grinder for better ore to ingot output. Oh, and I almost always make a Coke Oven as soon as I can, because coal coke is handy.
Desired items after that are electric tools, a charge pad, and some powered armor of some kind. After all that, I focus on getting more power output.
EDIT: I should explain what a good pad needs for me. Coke Oven(or two), a bed, some storage, needs to be creeper proof, or at least creeper resistant, basic tools for my mods which have tiers of items, and it should be easy to expand later. Also, needs to be well lit.
If I can't afford to set up a power conversion system, and can only afford to set up energy storage for one mod, then I just use that mods power until I can either set up energy systems from other mods.
My current idea is to use Thaumcraft for most things if I can, so most of my startup is just tons of research with Thaumcraft, until I can make the stuff I need from it.