I would avoid mindcrack if you are just starting out with mods as gregtech makes them all extremely hard, but otherwise what you go with Depends on the resources available
IC: Most of what you will need is copper iron and rubber from rubber trees
Thermal expansion: you will need large amounts of sand (for glass) gold and redstone.
Now for basic machines (do you know how to use NEI?)
IC: You will need a generator and a batbox along with some Insulated copper wire. to make the wire, look for rubber trees in swamp and forest biomes and use a treetap on the orange spots, remove the leaves for access and saplings, smelt the resin for rubber for now but dont make more than what you need
Place the batbox so that the dot is going alongside a wall in your machine room, then place your copper wire along the wall in that dot, now that you have a basic power setup make a macerator. this is how you double your ores. Then macerate some ores and make an extractor. this is how you will extract additional rubber from the resin. also i would get an electrical furnace to smelt using IC2 power as well... from there i would look at the industrialcraft wiki and go wherever you want
TE: You will need plenty of gold redstone and glass, along with a little clay for a couple brick blocks and a reasonable amount of iron for machine frames (Memorize that recipe or use a project table and RP2s indigo flower dye and make a plan for it) You will need an engine of some type like hobbyists steam engines or stirling engines, preferably two or more, and plenty of materials
I have seen people go with Railcrafts hobbyists steam engines for initial power, but as it takes more gold i am not sure. anyway you will need some gold transport pipes, and some redstone, combine those for conductive pipes, they will do until you can get redstone energy conduits but be careful of overcharging (when there is a lot of blue in the pipes, turn everything off/run) then you can make TE's ore doubler, the Pulverizer, hook it up to some conductive pipe and start pulverizing your ore, smelt some more and get a powered furnace. while you are at it i would also recommend making a sawmill. its priority is lower yes, but... it cuts logs into planks at 150% of what you would normally get. from there i am not too sure... but i am sure you and i both will figure it out soon XD (my guess is engine upgrades going into forestry and redstone conduits and cells)
Hope this wall of text isnt too wordy
good luck
