Well, it's not the line of thinking of my fellow players. They just want that simple infrastructure so they can concentrate on "cool", "fun" stuff.What I got from your post is IC2 is only worthwhile right now with GregTech. This is my line of thinking, although I doubt it was yours/your servers.
In that case that would be PvE or PvP exquipment like weapons, armor, utitity gear, it would also be content to explore like dungeons or monsters to fight like Ars Magica 2's end bosses.
For me though it is.
IC2 without Gregtech is boring to me, while with GT it amazes me.
I've only discovered how brilliantly cool GT's covers system is. When using GT right you can build extremely compact automated production facilities that also integrate well with practically every other mod. Yes, GT machines are better even than TE machines in that respect, and that's cool because that's just the incentive I need to spend that much more ressources and time on them.
At the moment I use my GT stuff to fill Extra Utilities drums with lava in the nether via GT liquid pipes.
I couldn't do that with IC2 alone as I wouldn't have a decent pump, I wouldn't have a decent lava-driven generator, I wouldn't have the pipes.
Most importantly though I love the many machines, especially the multiblock machines.
I remember one of my first vanilla minecraft experiences where I walked through my house full of useless empy rooms, dreaming of things that I could place in there to give them a reason to exist. Gregtech offers me lots of that stuff, things that I have to make room for, to build an infrastructure for, to breathe sense into all that room.
I would argue TE3 has just as much problem standing on its own. Yes it adds automation, but outside the simplification of tasks, and flobs, what does it do that adds to the gameplay in minecraft. For me TE must be used with other mods for there being any sense in having it in the first place.
Even build-craft suffers from this problems. Luckily for it, railcraft and forestry, extra bees, and magic bees provide it content
Indeed. But even more - of all the BC infrastructure mods, which one offers least content?
It's Buildcraft itself, I think. There are so many kinds of tubes and pipes and cables and tanks and redstone circuitry out there now, practically the only thing that makes Buildcraft really stand out is the quarry.
With TE, Railcraft, Forestry and Minefactory Reloaded or Rotarycraft installed the only real reason not to kick out Buildcraft is that some of the mods don't enable BC compatibility when they don't find it installed.
What I didn't like about it was the punishment for failure. The first time I accidentally blew up my entire arsenal of machines due to a wiring mistake, I nearly cried. That is one of the big things keeping me away from IC2e: the whole thing isn't refined yet, so strange bugs in the power system causes your machines to detonate. This, IMO, is one of the worst things you can have happen in any tech mod. It isn't hard, just punishing.
Yeah. I play IC2 + GT since the FTB Beta pack, so I know the mods a little. My story, happened yesterday:
Tried out a battery box from GT, filled it with the new batteries from IC2 which hold 100000 EU each. It didn't seem to work. I now know that I would have had to upgrade the battery box to medium voltage but there was nothing indicating that at that point.
I wanted to pick up the box, wrenched it wrong, orientating it so that it received power rather than emitting it - and it exploded, along with my CESU.
Pretty Obscure and unforgiving.
To power the rest of my machines, so that I could make the materials necessary to replace my CESU, I plugged a few cables from my two thermal generators (GT, ouput 24 EU/t) directly to my machines - which exploded violently.
I have not yet figured out why, but I guess they changed the way that power works so that my machines didn't receive two packages of 24 EU each but one package of 48 EU.
Very obscure and unforgiving.
Now I am a little worried whenever I place my AE Chest to access my ressources - would that go boom too, it would destroy days of work in an instant.
I was gonna like and then I saw this.
This is a real shame that it's such a common attitude, I personally blame the FTB team for not including any but MFFS (which a lot of people still assume is an IC2 addon).
Well, I tried out UE mods several times and they never really got me. Yeah, the graphics are well made with some cool and complex models, they offer those basic ore processng stuff, but most of the things that would have really been exciting didn't seem to work right (or at all) and I always had some weird energy conversion issues which caused immense energy multiplication. I once saw that UE steam mod that promised complex multipart steam engines with great models - I would have loved that, but it seems to be gone now.