You see this is what I find totally illogical about this entire system, you must drive influence to take a station. In order to do that you need to dominate trade and do missions that aid your faction. inevitably this will result in a boom which will deny you a civil war. Bringing weapons are needed to incite trouble and drive influence. How can you drive influence without causing a boom? When takeover is what you want?
As for not trading? That is daft. Our trade should be irrelevant to LFE. They should not be enjoying a boom at our expense. If anything they should be going through a recession as they are forced to buy their day to day needs from CSG stations further pushing our boom while forcing them to import everything and sell their goods ridiculously cheap driving their profits way down. We should be making money at their expense.
I agree there is a break down in logic...except that the owning faction always has to be involved because..well..game!? In other words CSG drove the boom, but the whole system, and particularly its owning faction, get to reap the rewards. Not very satisfying from CSG point of view, agreed, and illogical at one level, but makes sense when you think that we drove the whole planetary system economy to boom. As far as the individual states denying other states, I see it little more than waiting in line. We want a civil war, but the items are queued up and the queues are ordered the way they are due to cool down for the civil war. If we weren't in cooldown, the civil war probably would be the next thing in queue.