I hope some of you realize that when someone complains that their opponent's "heavy cruiser spam is backed up with flak and carriers with fighters" that it's not really "spam" at that point, it's called combined arms.

you're not supposed to counter heavy-cruiser spam after-the-fact. you should notice *far* before your enemy gets to heavy crusiers that he's been teching up, if he's been matching your armada tech up yourself (so that you can get to the technique I'm about to tell you about) or if he has a smaller force, or fewer forces, bash into his base and take down as many research stations as possible. even if he barely gets to heavy cruisers before you wipe out 3 research stations, he cant use the tech if he doesnt have the right amount of military hubs online, so from there you've got him at a significant economic disadvantage*if* and I stress this as a last resort, *if* he gets to heavy cruisers and you arent significantly above him in terms of military strength rely on support cruisers (very effective for the advent, if you're TEC or Vasari I venture to guess you're screwed) support cruisers can make even weak ships last quite longer, and then a few high level capital ships should be enough to hold him back. use ICONUS as much as possible (if you're advent) the enemy tends to ignore them, but they can give you incredibal survivability.