Like the era bonuses for each culture, the bonuses you can add to your faith are mostly simple modifiers to resource generation or modest military buffs.

There is a religion system, but only just. So to truly be a successful conqueror, you need to be exporting your gods and your top radio hits, not just have the biggest army. If you instead spread your religion or culture to one of their cities, you can gain a grievance against them for 'oppressing' your people, which will slowly tick up your side's war support over time.

You can just declare war out of nowhere, but doing so gives a large bonus to your enemy's war support, which is a measure of how enthusiastic their people are to fight you. Influence is also used quite a bit in the diplomacy system, and this is probably the cleverest idea Humankind brings to the genre. As a chill tile-painting game in which I can watch my civilization spread across the gorgeous world map, Humankind stands up well against its competition. These considerations made planning out my empire's path to prosperity an interesting and often challenging puzzle. Influence limits how much you can expand externally and spreads your culture to neighboring cities, while stability limits how much you can expand internally, as urban centers that sprawl out further and further become more difficult to govern. There are two new resources that mix things up a little.

Humankind game pass