Have you guys played Small World? They've got a new implementation of it coming out that uses the World of Warcraft theme.

Small World is a turned-based, tabletop game spanning approximately 10 rounds where players select from a pool of randomly linked Race and Power combinations.

You then take you race/power combination (with its combined tokens that represent your strength) and use it to gain and maintain area control over the board.

Eventually, and regularly, your race/power combination gets weaker and weaker each round as it tries to take more territory (spreading thin) and fending off the other player's race/power combos who take territory back (losing some of your fixed, unreplinishable tokens each time).

At some point, the player has to decide: Keep with the weakening race/power or pass a whole turn (go into decline) to reselect another race/power combo and reinvade at renewed strength the next round. But, when you go into decline, your race doesn't go away, it remains on the board and (in some cases) has lingering powers - you could call them "legacy" effects.

So much of this reminds me of what they are doing in Humankind with the amalgamation of your civilization over the course of the game.

Even though this game originally came out in 2009, it still holds up despite all the many mechanical refinements that have taken place over the last couple of decades in modern board gaming. Small World is an excellent game. I'm really curious. Was there inspiration taken from this?

(active race vs race put in decline)

Many digital implementations of popular board games are pretty rubbish, but the digital version of Small World is actually one of the best:

Small World on Steam