You can crew 15 strike cruisers per ISD, and yes you'll have more guns and troops. But you're also possibly not using them as efficiently as the ISD does its own troops, guns, and so on.
Most members of a naval vessel's crew aren't troops or pilots or gunners, they are engineers, technicians, maintenance crews, logistics officers, flight deck crews, cooks, and all sorts of other roles need to be filled on a ship to keep it running. A single large vessel will need a larger such custodial staff than a smaller one, but it won't be proportional because a lot of these kinds of duties scale very well - a crew 15 times larger doesn't need 15 times as many cooks when you have automated systems in place to assist those cooks, but when you have 15 ships, you DO need 15 times as many cooks because each ship needs its own set. The same applies to all the other support crews, and it also applies to things like engine components, sensor systems, main computer cores, structural supports, and many other systems. Having more ships means you are multiplying how many of these roles need to be filled, which can be an inefficient use of your resources.
On top of this, there is the matter of attrition. A zergling rush may well work, but it is going to take heavy casualties before it wins. Say you have a Kaloth battlecruiser to take out - a ship a third the size of an ISD that a star destroyer can handle with ease and with minimal damage making it through the ISD's powerful shields. Say you send 15 strike cruisers at it rather than an ISD. You may kill the Kaloth even faster... but none of your ships individually have the shields or hull integrity to handle a return volley. So while you blast it with your opening round, they spend their opening round firing back and killing one or two or three of your strike cruisers. The ISD can handle this with almost no losses of its own beyond perhaps a handful of TIEs, but the strike cruisers probably will lose a cruiser or two in the process.
There is also then the matter of command complexity. Let's look again at an ISD vs a Kaloth, which we see happen in I, Jedi. There is a clear command hierarchy aboard the ISD, and maintaining crew coordination is fairly simple, which allows the ISD to fire devastating broadsides that overload the Kaloth's shields instantly - but had those weapons not fired in sync with each other, had the Kaloth's shields had time to absorb the turbolaser bolts as they arrived individually rather than all at once, the Kaloth can survive the volley and continue to fight back (Corran survives an ISD volley on a passenger liner by causing this to happen). With your 15 strike cruisers, coordinating your fire is a lot harder - you have to maintain ship to ship communications which are vulnerable to jamming, you have to maneuver your ships properly so that they can all engage the enemy together, and rather than a single order being given to a single senior tactical officer directing a single weapons crew working on a single computer system, you have 15 orders being given to 15 captains to pass to 15 tactical officers directing 15 weapons crews on 15 computer systems. You may have more guns on your 15 strike cruisers, but making those guns work together with the same efficiency of an ISD's is a LOT harder.
And to top it all off, the Emperor wasn't wrong regarding the psychological impact of larger ships or weapons. One giant ship is a lot scarier than a bunch of small ones. Over and over again we see the impact an ISD's appearance can have, how its sheer size can be unnerving even for veteran officers and pilots. Every second that your enemy's mind is focused on simply how big and scary you are is a second they aren't fighting you effectively, a second in which fear can take hold and cause them to freeze up, or to surrender without even fighting in the first place.
The key is to find an ideal balance between all these factors (and more). Thrawn believed that the ISD, with its own TIE fighter support fleet, best represented that balance in the Imperial Navy, and I tend to agree.
Topic: Strike Cruisers vs SSD (Read 2493 times)