I always liked to think that warfare in the original eventually just devolved into ramming conflict, and the giant system-ships just used FTL to reach the enemy and ram them. Because aside from blanketing an entire system in indiscriminate fire, they really couldn't do anything else. The death toll for a single battle could easily be in the billions, trillions if a system-ship was taken down. 

That gives a whole new perspective on the fact that I was having the AIF spiral down a militaristic path, they were completely ready to cause trillions of deaths for what their culture calls right. Pretty short-sighted.