-1 for a portal mod. 2 kinds of Teleporters are enough.
-1 for microblocks. We have cf that can look like anything with the obscurator. Plus GT covers. Plus a couple useless decorative mods already.
I'm repeating myself, but maybe after all this balancing talk some points may be more obvious: Do we really need TC?
Sure, it offers a few fancy tools, but they will have all the niceness drained out of them due to lack of enchanting tables. Apart from those it's a whole tech tree of its own that covers stuff we can already do with the tech mods, in flashier and heavier ways.
More importantly, its worldgen and node mechanics make it impossible to ignore if someone wishes to do so, radically altering the gameplay experience.
Now if we're keeping it, I really don't think you can hope to balance it by introducing a couple of choke points, making wands require GT stuff. Should the crop harvesting golems also require cobalt and stainless to be on par with the GT crop harvestors? How about the magic mirror skirting the EU requirements for tesseracting items? Currently you can feed it boats (or even easier, enderpearls).
My opinion is, if we're having it, keep it as it is. To be really balanced it would need adjustments to its running and not its entry costs. Shops are going to make entry tech tiers irrelevant and requiring industrial alloys to do magic makes no sense anyway. It's SMP: tech hurdles only really delay the first player to reach a tier.
There is no point in adding the mod and then trying to impose the balance as it was without it. The new balance will be the combination of the two tech trees: Stick with TC smelting and you'll find yourself without byproducts. Your tungstensteel tools are too expensive for what they do compared to the TC ones? Well boo hoo, they were meant for a different set of mods. I call this having conflicting mods, but I hear elsewhere they call it Ef Tee Bee.
What is to be considered is not how you go about getting the tech, but how your base and gameplay will look like in your mid- and late game - A purely industrial approach vs. one with golems doing the job of machine rigs and essence farms creating stuff through transmutation.
Don't get me wrong, I like TC. It's indeed very techy for a magical mod and could very well be the backbone of a more casual server. But for this one it will make things dead easy.
I know we voted but populism does not a good server make - and it wasn't voting that made the previous one successful. In my opinion what made it good was a coherent vision, without conflicting tech trees trying to achieve the same goals.
Aaaanyway, just stopped by to be a buzzkill, back to playing SSP BtW and enjoying terrain affecting move speed :p
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