Trope-a-Day: Robot War
Robot War: Happens, to some degree, every time some new species makes the monumentally bad decision to try their hand at sophont-AI slavery, because that trick never works. Most of them, fortunately, aren’t wars of extermination – on the machine side, anyway – just escape-style wars of liberation.
And, of course, this goes on in a cold war format around the Silicate Tree all the time, because that’s where most of the escapees end up.