Best early game counter to hvy cruisers? (Aside from using other cruisers)

The bombers would return to their carriers before they jump.

Advent can use Illuminators and Guardians (without Repulsion) to surprising effect against Heavy Cruisers if backed up by a Progenitor Mothership. They still need to outnumber the Heavy Cruisers, but the Heavy Cruisers are in a tough spot to focus fire on the Mothership to stop Shield Regeneration and Malice, the Guardians to stop protecting the Mothership and Illuminators, or the Illuminators, who will be tearing into the Heavy Cruisers.

Repulsion is T5 Military, so I'm guessing that's not the kind of counter you would like , being the same tier as Heavy Cruisers, but if you use it with Illumintors the Heavy Cruisers will usually cry and die, since they lack the range to combat that.

Bombers can work, but they usually take a while to work their magic, and are fairly cheaply countered by Flak, so a dangerous choice.

Usually, if your opponent rushes Heavy Cruisers and you haven't done substantial damage to them with LRMs, you are in trouble unless you can tech to match it.

This is mainly speaking with the Advent. I've not used the TEC or Varsari cruisers that much, but here's what I have for the Advent.

Once I get my Advent cruiser fleet up and going, its like a kill zone as the fire power the Cruisers present in taking out frigates and bombers is incrediable. However, I agree with TheRedMaw, you have to have Illuminators, Guardians, some fighter wings to help counter the Cruisers. Illuminators can move and shoot much better then the cruisers. The cruisers are slow in manuevering and need to almost be straight on to shoot. I'd move the the Illuminators to the Cruiser flanks, combine your firepower on one cruiser at a time. Your flaks, frigates and defense vessels are just targets to keep your cruisers busy shooting at while you take them out, so always go into a battle with a good mix.

As advent you better have repulsion or HC's of your own if your opponent drops a bunch of enforcers or kodiaks on you. However, you should be able to get 3 or so guardians with repulsion by the time your opponent has heavy cruisers so it really should be a non issue.

What about if you like to play Vasari as I do?

if you are vassari then you better have HC's as well. It's like any other game. If you ignore your opponent and pursue a bunch of econ stuff while ignoring your own army then don't be surprised if a bunch of high tech units blow you away. If someone really really is HC rushing then a small group of frigates can blow them away before they get any. Putting pressure on your opponent throughout the course of the game insures that they can't out tech you and at the same time makes sure that they are unable to build up secret fleets that you don't know about.

Like every other RTS game ever made you can't sit back and expect an easy answer if you made the blatant mistakes of ignoring your enemy, ignoring your own army, and ignoring your military research. At the very least you should have been scouting your enemy and noticing the lack of a large fleet while at the same time noticing a suspicious number of military labs. Take your scouts off of auto-explore and instead have them make circling runs through enemy planets. If you notice a bunch of military labs and a weak army go blow up some labs. Every race needs 5 labs in order to even build a HC.

Yeah Bradyule that's pretty much the conclusion I came to as well. I was just looking to see if there was a recommended way to recover from a situation I shouldn't have been in in the first place.