I have only ever mained Vasari rebels and I really like them, and I get a lot of people complaining that they're OP. I don't mind the no jumping SB rule that is generally in play, but why is everyone still complaining?

I can kind of get how the jumping Starbase thing might be abused, but even so, you have to aquire level 8 civic tech and they weaken after consecutive jumps. I have hardly ever felt that it'd be necessary to get that upgrade, and when I have, it's only because I was sitting around with my economy rolling and I didn't want to ruin it with a fleet capacity upgrade. I have always just seen is as a convenient way to re-locate a starbase more then anything, thus when I'm told that I can't have this upgrade in a game, I doesn't bother or even affect me.

People complain about phase missiles, which I agree are powerful and allow you to more effectively pick off capital ships, but that's the kind of thing I signed up for when I selected this faction. I feel that it hurts a lot more when I lose Vasari ships than when I've played with other factions, and I feel it when I play against the other factions. When a TEC player starts spamming stuff me, he may take careless losses by blind assaults, but that's the kind of guerrilla stuff that Vasari are good at. If they couldn't do it, they'd have no momentum; they'd just have Marzas, massed corvettes and Cobalts running amok.

Also, I've read about Vasari being too strong against Advent, because phase missiles bypass the shields to hit the weak armor behind it. However, all that I've read only takes into account direct statistics.

I'm going to go slightly off topic to prove a point here: Now, before I bought Sins, I played Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath on the Xbox, which was unbalanced and never got patched, because it was on the Xbox. Some of you may have played it already on whatever console, but the faction Scrin had an 'epic' unit (basically a titan) that could be escorted by these fast-healing bug-like things called 'corruptors' (each one capable of healing faster then damage could generally be done by another single unit), allowing it to chew up entire armies. The only way to kill these would have been to get behind the epic unit or use expensive powers on them. should the army have been able to actually take on the epic unit anyway, it could be instantly teleported back to base by the factions' commando unit, healed again by a bunch more of those corruptors and then put through a rinse and repeat cycle until it reached maximum rank (at this point, having double fire rate, nearly double firepower and armor, as well as passive self-healing). Everyone complained and it was the worst, cheesiest legitimate tactic there was, and it was so economically cheap to do that you could have a full supporting army with it; but there was a way to beat it, and that was to either foil the setup process, or cleverly anticipate it and use flanking tactics to disarm both the corruptors and commando back at it's base. At this point, the opponent could be defeated as straightforwardly as his own shitty plan came to fruition. The point is that OP tactics can be beaten, even when statistics might say otherwise, because statistics do not tell the whole story in an RTS.

I bet that the Advents' phase missile weakness can be countered, not directly, but with alternative tactics. If I am correct, Vasari tactics revolve around mobility, desperation, guerrilla tactics, and are most effective when the enemy is careless. Obviously being mobile and having powerful defenses, they have a lot of time to destroy a planet before actually being needed elsewhere, especially in the late game. I'm not going to argue and say that  there is an easy way to beat Vasari in the late, but if I have to dedicate my limited and currently immobile Vasari fleet to tasks that I can't run away from, and I can't set up, I'm going to be in trouble later on. Playing as Vasari, I've never felt that my entire fleet could be powerful enough to defend two sides of my empire; Plus, with strength in numbers being the general rule with any RTS, I can't really afford to split my precious fleet.

TEC and Advent have motherships with fleet-supporting abilities. With these, you might be able to rush past the early Vasari front and attempt to colonize a stray planet beside them. By having ship production on this planet as well as a supportive mothership, you could have a sort of pseudo-mobility where their attack is anticipated and the ships you're going to retaliate with are being produced on the scene, and are readily supported. The key difference is that you're spending resources where they can't, and your threat has denied them preparation. from then on. If they ignore the planet, they either have to spend a lot of resources setting up defense around it or you are from then on the system is as accessible to you as it is to them. If they destroy it, it still costs them the time that they need to be defending their set-up.

Of course, I'm not sure that any of this could actually be done, but having played the game for a good few months and having gotten a feel for it AND actually playing as Vasari Rebels, I think I have some understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.