I see no point in banning something that is broken, if someone rolls VR and you don't want them too then tell them to reroll and if they wont kick them. But I have played VL and then VR and in my personal experience, apart from the mobile SB VR have, VL seemed more powerful to me, The ability to have 2 mili and civs labs on every capital and the ability to suck planets dry was very nice and hit opponents hard.
I've done this offline and online (me and 4 friends who always play this together) as VR and VL. One easy way to suck up someones planet is to send a horde of planet bombers at them with a couple colony frigates sitting behind, that combined with maxed bombing range tech and you can quickly snipe down a planet and then ninja it, following up by scuttling it for its juicy juicy resources. Now do that while you have a fleet off poking them in the side and you can snipe off their planets and get a tonne of resources in the process.
I don't do this as the norm but it occurred to me that it was worth trying. But I found all I needed was a barren planet and an ice planet and I generally had all the resources I could want. Stack the barren with trading hubs and ice with factories and a comm beacon. Then I had some crystal income and an area for production, and a massive credit income to buy what resources I needed or for use with pirates. As the manipulation tech was nice to bolster my gains from pirates. Or when we did a team game the large amount of credits was good for boosting relations.
Other then that I had 2 large fleets, with all purchased ranks at least (including rank tech), hitting them in different places and keeping them on the back foot. Now with VR I found I didn't have that ability, I had to build labs instead of trade ports or other structures, took an extended amount of time to build a nice structured fleet fit for taking enemy space. Sure the mobile star bases were a nice secondary titan and help when overwhelming defences or pushing a conflict in your favour. But compared to VL they just didn't seem to match up in aggressive power.
But I suppose its possible VR are for a different play style to mine, I like having large defences protecting my assets, without such a thing I tend to turtle but with VL It was with my fleet so I could just zip around draining planets. VR I couldn't get the speed as I had with VL and so ended up not being nearly as aggressive and having a rather hard fight on my hands when I got attacked.
