[cyberax]

The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately?

Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.

Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.