I really enjoyed reading through this. Had a few thoughts that might balance things out a bit / make pleyers more cautious:
- Make higher leveled tribals consume more food per turn. Typically speaking, the more productive/badass members of the tribe got the most and the best food, while the more useless members got the scraps. Just divide their level by two and round up, and use the result to determine how much they consume.
- I like that "Your weakest tribe-members die first" when starving, but techbically it should be your oldest members. Give a generation for each member. Your starting five are Generation 1, any born on the next breeding are Generation 2, and so on. This should limited how many tribals they use for breeding (since more per generation means a greater loss while starving), and it can cause you to lose higher level members to something other than the Bolt spell.
- Roll more than twice for levels on new tribals, if applicable. If you've got six newborns, and you only roll twice, you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting three level tens. That's just the start of possible crazy.
- Add a failure chance for hunting. Seriously, hunting could go wrong and lose you some tribals.
- Come up with a way to force players to do more than "turtle" in their camps. Currently, you can just have a good chunk of your low-level guys breed every-turn, while you high level guys do nothing but hunt (bringing in ever increasing amounts of meat and bones) while your shaman uses his massive bone pile to cast flaming death at everyone else. My suggestions will probably help with that (making the above strategy a bit riskier, and with less reward), but you might want to tweak some of the other formulas as well.