A lot of these cards are pretty crap, but some are just trying to push you toward a particular playstyle. The lack of food upgrades for farms is to direct you to get your food from livestock. The problem is that the cards are a bit underpowered to properly facilitate that.
Kilishi Jerky and Suya Skewers are actually okay cards. The only issue is that age 3 is a bit late for Suya Skewers. Buffing Kilishi Jerky to also give +10% yield to hunts and livestock would be enough to buff both. It would help your hunts to last into age 3 and also give your livestock a total of +25% yield to make butchering them viable.
Moroccan Leather is a total waste if you don’t end up eating your livestock, which is most of the time. If it shipped a few goats along with it that could be enough to make it worth it. Or it could just be rolled into the Morocco age up.
Crossing Festival should slightly improve the livestock fattening rate to make it actually better than the 4 cows card.
With all the above changes, you could have a pretty viable food economy just from butchering livestock. You’d be getting 750 food and 50 influence from each cow and 360 food and 30 influence from each goat butchered (minus decay). You also retain the full +15% from Pulaaku Code if you go with livestock gathering instead of farming and the Granary aura applies to both. If you focused mainly on goats you’d avoid villagers getting too out of control and killing all your cows.
Cards like Koose and Amina Epic mainly need to apply to past and future units and buildings instead of current ones. No one is going to make 10 farms just to get 300 food.
Hadeija Emirate and some of the unit shipment cards need to ship a couple more units to be worth it.
Fulani Invasion could maybe be combined with the Fulani Archer Combat card. That would be a bit of an age 3 nerf though.
Yawon Dandi needs to also reduce the population of all outlaws by one.
All the cards for walls and defenses are also quite useless. Team Hausa Gates is basically entirely superseded by Gatekeepers. Team Ancient Kano Walls seems like it only exists to make some absurd stats on walls technically possible for a Hausa, Portugal, and China team. Katsina Fortifications needs to do something more like increasing health or build limit to be worth it. The only reason why these cards might ever be used is because City Walls costs way too much. It should really have at least 50% or its cost as wood considering it can be researched directly from the wall, not just the University/Monastery.
Shared African cards like Hegemony, Mass Levies, and Draft Oxen are just too bad to ever be used.
There are also a few techs that need some refining. For example, Cow Loans takes forever to research. Way too often I’ll start to research it and then mess up and sell a cow before it is done. It already requires that you sell more than 6 cows to break even, so it could at least research quickly so that it can be used right away.
