Not sure how valid that is, because I mostly played with unlimited cap mod... But in my experience Bulwark III's as spearhead/tanks backed by mass Invincible-class Dreadnaughts melted ISDs well enough. Invincible's are pretty powerful carriers, so I was usually able to gain air superiority with my fighters and weaken the ISD with bomber runs, while the concussion missle volleys did the heavy lifting. Invincibles are pretty fragile, but can do wonders from the second line and if bombers try to beak through and hit them directly they get massacred by the laser cannons. Also, if you capture Mon Calamari and build the special buillding there you can also kind of mass produce them at very affordable price for what they provide.

In general, B1 spam on land and Invincible spam in space made my CSA playthrough more fun than I expected at first, even if a bit silly. Learned to love both the derpy droid horde and the flying rust buckets quite a lot.

CSA feels like an unfinished faction tbh. They're good for a short small GC in era 1-3 but that's about it. They get extremely boring and unnecessarily difficult to play in the long term because they just get left behind, hard.

They have no progression mechanics: no researches or ways to steadily gain new heroes/build options like NR and Imperial factions over the course of a GC.


All CSA does have is a ship market, and while it is a fun concept, some of the chances for units on it are silly low(anything below 1% is honestly stupid in videogames in general, outside of maybe mmos) and it gets old hoping for something good only for yet another CR90 or other forgettable outdated-and-not-worth-the-cost ship to appear.

Carriers especially are WAY too overrepresented in their roster, considering their bombers - the main reason you're bringing carriers - honestly suck considering the potency of anti-fighter corvettes in TR.

What would make the faction much better is:
-More corporate hire heroes from various worlds throughout the galaxy, giving long term strategic goals. Basically more heroes like Tagge where, unless integrated first, can be hired by CSA. It's not unreasonable to believe some imperial or former separatist heroes would defect to CSA if promised a big enough payday. Former separatists especially make a lot of sense given that NR often did not have good relations with them even though they both opposed the empire.

-Some form of tech progression. The CSA picket fleet is one made largely of ships bought second hand, but it would make sense that should the GCW go on for a long period of time, they would start refurbishing and upgrading the systems of these. They did this very often, for example with the Etti lighter. It would not be out of the question to take aging ships like Lucrehulk carriers, providences, munificents, and other old clone wars tech to "keep up." Could even have it tied to owning certain corporate buildings associated with said units.

-The ship market in general ought to be a bit more dynamic. Not sure if possible, but it would be amazing if the chances of certain ships on the market fluctuated with the state of galactic factions. For example, certain units might become more available if a faction which uses that unit a lot is defeated, or if the world which manufactures such units were owned by the CSA. By contrast, certain units would be rarer if the faction using them was much more dominant among the others. Basically tying ship chances into amount of worlds owned, and by whom. A simpler way might simply be taking one unit unique to a faction and replacing a unit of similar type on the market roster if that faction is defeated.

-A ground version of the ship market, featuring lots of otherwise rare PDF and older units.

-A more radical idea is having ship and ground markets replace tax centers, functioning similar to trade ports where the more worlds linked to a market world, the more it makes, potentially allowing worlds to make far more than if taxed especially when stacked with trade ports themselves. This would give CSA playstyle a particular interest in worlds linked to lots of others, rather than a world's location value purely from a military conquest standpoint.

-Alternatively to the latter, have ship markets make units also cheaper and quicker to build, thereby giving more incentive actually build things that would otherwise be a waste of time and credits to bother with. Would fit perfectly considering the whole premise of the market is buying off surplus ships no one wants to use anymore, and that they're not being assembled but "delivered."

It's not the only faction like this. Hapans and EotH also have this issue. What you start with is really all you get for the most part.
It's a real shame because, as you said, their ground game is especially awesome! They're probably the only faction I truly look forward to ground battles with, whereas others tend to feel awful for me(hutts) or just necessary busy work(everyone else.) The shield espos that spawn from one of their field bases are super fun to use, droideka rush-cap is great, some of the best artillery in the game, and EASILY the best air units by-far. Those aero interceptors are nasty and make new republic V-wings and PA nemesis gunships look pathetic.