Ever wonder what else is around the map? Scroll upwards and look around and you will find a nearly endless landscape. You’ll be able to see mountains, lakes, abandoned settlements, and even settlements that are occupied and belong to the tribes that are on the land. Plan ahead to figure out where you want to expand to, depending on what your goals are.
At some point you’ll end up in some good old fashioned tribal warfare against other tribes. There’s a number of strategies you can use to mitigate this. If you want to do it without God Powers, then start boxing them in by manipulating layers to build steep mesas and mountains, or start drowning them by taking away layers until you hit water and cause their tribesmen to land in the water.
Otherwise, there is plenty that you can do with the God Powers. Use the previously-mentioned Finger of God to set fire to their settlements and their people, as well as their landscapes. Create a swamp for an automatic blighted land that they can’t cross. Use the Meteorite attacks to blow away an entire enemy settlement.
God Powers can increment your belief and your follower count as well. Use the seeding power to plant trees around your settlements and abodes, or alternatively, simply build close to trees that already exist in order to get this (rather inexpensive) boost for free. Send down the Rain of Purity in order to cause trees (and fields, for the farms) to grow faster.
Settlements will cause abodes to cluster together. Spend a little more in order to use the settlements in a wiser manner. Cluster the new settlements right next to the old settlements so that there is little to no breathable space in between the two and so that settlements of a similar type (farms, mines or builder settlements) end up building on top of each other. This makes it so that you can eventually make more and more settlements in a smaller area of space, and so that you’ll have more and more new plots in which to build abodes, farms, mines, or whatever else.
As upgrades continue to be released for Godus, the map will expand beyond its current borders. Keep looking around (whenever it is that you get that far) to the north, south, east, west, and a combination of the above, past the borders of where the buildable layers are.