As for the fusion taking 24 of those, if anything I would say make the ring larger and take more of them as this is a powerful tool and it needs to be costly; it should be quite an achievement to finally get one. Legit building of such high technology, as it stands right now, can still be done very quickly, especially on a server where people work together, such as on mine
Massfabrication will get massively overhauled, what implicitely means that Iridium will be much harder to get. (my 64x64-BC-Quarry only got 2 Iridiumore). Scrap will still be an Amplifier, actually you MUST have tons of Scrap to produce UUM. (but Scrap will get indirectly buffed, so that you still need ~33.3 per UUM, because otherwise the Scrapboxing will get out of hand)
Perhaps a better recipe would be some sort of motor (generator I guess) in the center surrounded by iron blades for a standard rotary type water mill, only returning one as well? Plus as water mills are right now the windgen outdoes them for 'vanilla IC2' usage anyway.
Aluminium used in Watermill instead of Wood, will fix that a bit. And RP-Watermills with their 500EU at 1EU/t are low efficient enough to still give 2 per crafting.
As for the end-game energy sinks those were just examples. We just need *something(s)* that eat far too much energy for us to generate without multiple fusions, for example.
And you will get those "something(s)". The great Massfabnerf will be part of it.
For proper balance IC2 really should have gone the way of, say, energy being very limited, machines can run on less just be less efficient, and the more energy then the more efficient they become. Energy should be a limited/time-constrained resource, as it is it is fully unlimited within a surprisingly short period of time, thus making it so you can just tech up quickly, within a few days with little effort, and within one real life day if you really try.
For that kind of infinite Energy you need tons of Overworldspace (Wind/Solar), which is a massive securityleak. Imagine the Massfab will need 100 Times more Energy per piece of UUM (That's 16,666,666 EU with the needed Scrap). Do you really want to place tenthousands of Solarpanels/Windmills just to power it? Regenerative Energysources are only suitable for powering the basic Machines for "Free", not the heavyduty ones.
The highest tiers such as 4, 5, and even higher, should require *massive* investment to not only create but even to just maintain it. On a server only a few people should be able to even achieve the highest tiers within a month with vast cooporation, such technology would encourage land wars, trade, and a great growth of ecosystem. It could become quite an expansive and impressive mod if it was just 're-tiered' and rebalanced, and this mod could definitely help that.
That's already Part of my Goals for this Addon. Large Ecosystems and usefull War are a good thing, because FUN.
But when my AI is completed (not even started to code it yet, but i have large experience with 2D-AI from the Game which i played before Minecraft), then you will have other worries than PvP-War, guess what happens when for example 5 AI-Pro-Gamer-Players are attacking your Servercrew with HighTech, Nukes and SuperLasers (which they aquired in the World like any other legit Player).
Almost edit because i recognized the ninja before that:
The Lightningrod just calls worldObj.isThundering() and worldObj.isRaining(), nothing more. I'm pretty sure xComp overloads the Worldclass, so he can just let those return true.
