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Worldbuilding

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    $\begingroup$ I do not see why civilizations would continue a war when just attacking an enemy takes longer to happen than a single lifetime. If you are a leader of such a race, there is no satisfaction (or political capital) from launching such an attack (which will cost resources immediately and hence both political and financial capital for no gain) when no result will appear in your lifetime. Also robot fleets designed to attack planets and acting autonomously - sound more like creating a new problem than solving an existing one. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 2:08
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    $\begingroup$ Centuries of travel time between worlds precludes the idea of empires. There's no communication, exchange of culture, commerce, or any practical remittance of taxes to maintain a unified empire or any other type of unified polity. Worlds would be pretty much doing their own thing by themselves and would rapidly declare independence. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 3:35
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    $\begingroup$ How would you know that there's an enemy out there, if the messages took centuries, or at least decades to reach home? Also, war speeds up technological advancement tremendously, so probably the second wave of generation ships/war fleets will be overtaken by the fourth. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 7:39
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    $\begingroup$ I applaud OP's recognition of the fragility of "squishy" lifeforms, but remind him that tolerable acceleration needs to be considered for interplanetary travel which suggests that Earth to Mars would probably be days rather than hours. @GrumpyYoungMan hence also Krugman's 1978 paper on interstellar trade princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 10:11
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    $\begingroup$ "System to system travel, while faster than light, still takes centuries. Neighboring systems might be 200 years [apart]" Are you assuming most systems lack habitable planets? Or much sparser stars? Because even at c travel speed, we can reach our neighboring system (Alpha Centauri system) in under 4.5 years (under 4.25 to reach the outlying star of the system, Proxima Centauri). 200 years at even low FTL speeds means an absolute ton of star systems; Earth has roughly a quarter million stars within 250 light years. $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 6, 2020 at 13:46