With the HUGE amount of vasari skirantra bomber spam and carrier cap spam in general, you are pretty much stuck with having to get a carrier cap to start with.  There is little way around it.  If there is a vasari beside you, expect to see at least 2 skirantras with scramble bomber spamming.  The best way to respond is generally get carrier cruisers with bombers yourself or go lrm spam with some flak and try to snipe a cap before they can run it to repair.  That and keep your caps near the grav well edge and ready to jump the hell out.  The thing is they know that trick too and usually can easily get the cap out before its killed.

[_]-Greyfox

I don't get it either!  As I said, I used to be able to wipe 'em out equally well - I typically play on a custom-made map that's randomly-generated each time, but I was able to take this detail into account and it STILL wouldn't matter as to how easily I wiped 'em out.

Woops.  I just overlooked the playing single player part for some reason.  Generally against AI you should build SB with repairs on what you think will be your border worlds with the AI.  With a decent SB, you can hold off much larger AI fleets with relative ease.  They will happily suicide themselves on an SB all day long.  Meteor is especially useful for the advent SB so you can get rid of massive fleets easily.  It is also nice to have a hangar with shield bestowal so it can cover the repair platforms and frig factories with shields and to have SC to kill the siege frigates they throw at you stupidly.  If you have a cap to soak up exp, you will have it leveling up in no time.  If you are going early civ as advent, there is no reason not to plop down a culture near or at the hw so that you get an early econ bump along with 2 terran pop upgrades.  As far as TEC I am less useful as I only play advent but it is fairly similar regardless.  AI always has trouble with starbases.

[_]-Greyfox