I liked that it is easy to balance the resources at first (thanks for the tip on collecting food), but I would have liked more of a challenge after a while. Having random events that affect the resources as you mentioned is a good idea. For example, there could be storms that destroy the shrines, or rats eating the excess food.
Even though there is a lot of information on screen, there are some data that I would have liked to have, like the number of turns (to compare how well one did after winning a couple times), how many followers/prisoners are free out of the total (no task assigned yet in this turn), how much food is produced with the current amount of farmers and how much food is needed at the end of the turn to keep all followers alive. Some data, like how many of the farms are occupied in the current turn out of the total, don't even need to be precise, a progress bar would be enough.
To make it more appealing, I would keep the left panel with the general information and actions, but replace the main screen area with a simple map with the farms, a forest, a delimited empty space where you can build the mines, other space for the shrines, etc. So you can, for example, click the farms to see the farm information in a popup, and there add farmers or cultivate more land, and so on for the other places.
Overall, I liked the take on the theme and the genre choice. Also the game works and I could not find any bug, so well done!
Viewing post in Cult of Taal-zuz jam comments
well I posted the post-jam updates I've made so far https://tokkitron.itch.io/post-jam-of-taal-zuz (password gdjs2024) your rating should still be the jam version ofc