Just picked this game up, and really enjoying it. However, I've hit something that is kinda frustrating and feels like it gives the Greeks an edge over the Norse, especially early on.
Marauders and Huscarls require the same finished goods buildings, namely the Smithy and Butcher. Huscarls additionally require horse meat, but since horse meat is produced at a butcher there doesn't seem to be any way to produce marauders but not huscarls, except not having any stables anywhere on your entire side.
Compunding this is that horses are a slowly generating resource and huscarls require a lot of it. This seems to often result in a barracks that could be producing a marauder sitting idle for 2-3 turns waiting for enough resources to build a huscarl.
So is this WAD? 'Cause it's kinda been frustrating me.
The Huscarls missing resources wont cause the Mauraders to not be produced. If you're running out of horse meat, the barracks will simply designate huscarls as unavailable, and produce the next unit down the line (the order is from top to bottom), in this case, Mauraders, if they're available based on your resources. In the building's tooltip it will say "Next in queue" next to the unit that will be produced next when the cooldown ends.
The reason why your barracks and things sit idle is because there is always a cooldown between one produced unit and the next. Changing what resources are available will never alter this, unless you make it so that all 4 possible units cant be produced due to missing something. There will always be a 2-3 (I forget which) cooldown on these buildings. It's one reason why it's important to build more than one at a time, and to keep track of resources and make sure these buildings have what they need.
As for what to do about the early game imbalance, there's a few tricks you can use.
1. Produce more Norse units than Greek
2. Use "Unit Up" to boost Norse units where needed, micromanaging the battles; it's more effective than you might think.
3. Smite a key building in the Greek city.... probably the Butcher.... to halt production of all units in that city at once until you're ready for some more to appear
4. Use Norse myth units to balance things out a bit. Yes, you can use these in the first Age, but early on the resources are difficult to get. I strongly suggest that in your starting group of 9 buildings you include 1 or 2 Seers and possibly a diamond mine, so that production of those important resources can begin right away, allowing earlier access to myth units that use those things. Beware though: Myth units are strong! Use them with care, and have a backup plan in case they go on a rampage and do more destruction than you planned.
5. Use tokens like Singasteinn that are grabbable by human troops; keep in mind that these are grabbable by BOTH sides! So if you want to, say, use Pandora's Box, which is a Greek item, to boost the Norse side, you can! It's all in the placement with these. Be careful with these though, as they can have quite the strong effect! And dont let bandits grab them.