I have to admit that even though I have been playing this game since the first beta from EWOM, I have no clue what influence does. What does influence do in the game?  Could a tool tip be added to it explaning it, since it isn't very intuitive what it actually does.

Thanks. I forgot about wildings and such costing influence. I didn't know that henchmen cost influence, so that is good to know. I was thinking that influence might have some correlation to diplomatic relations, but had no idea how that worked. I am going to assume it does not, and only worry about keeping enough to hire henchmen.

The funny thing is, that Influence is suppose to be traded to the AI for peace treaties, materials and shit like that.  But, they don' value it very high.  I think Influence is worth 2 gold to them.  But if you need Influence to build a resource or henchman and want to trade for the influence they have, it cost 100 gold per influence.  It's pretty fucking ridiculous.  Also, unless you have the Heroic faction trait, you will never have very much Influence.  So this fucks Kraxis the most, as they have two special abilities that need influence and no way to build it.  Altar on the other hand, needs 50 per henchman, but has heroic and wanderlust so they can get thousands of influence and can build dozens of Henchmen.