Charminar Gate

The Charminar Gate is an Indian Wonder in Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties.

Overview
The Charminar Gate serves as a general "train all" building and produces Mansabdar type units. Those units are quite useful and enhances all similar units under its line of sight with "morale". The Charminar Gate also ships Sowars or Mahout Lancers in your town center as a completion bonus, aside the aging-up bonus.

The Mansabdar Units
The Mansabdar units are powerful units trained at the Charminar Gate wonder, which inspires all similar units, somewhat similar to the Japanese Daimyo, but Mansabdars cannot train units or receive home city shipments. They are enabled with proper age: the Mansabdar Mahout Lancer will not be able to train unless the player enters the Fortress Age. They typically have decorative uniforms and equipment, making it easy to distinguish them from normal units. Every Mansabdar unit affects only their similar and don’t increase the attack strength, speed or hit points of other non-related units. The Mansabdar Gurkha inspires all other Gurkha and the Mansabdar Flail Elephant will inspire other Flail Elephants.

All of the Mansabdar units cost twice as much as regular ones, require more population and train a little bit slower than a simple unit, making the Mansabdar units only available for players who mixed a good and productive economy with a powerful and hard-to-beat army. The most expensive units that the Indians can train are the Mansabdar elephants: they cost more population than a singular unit, though the Home City elephant upgrades will help a little bit. But the high cost of the Mansabdar units are compensated by their high combat stats and unique special abilities, helping the player achieve a conquest victory if the same player handles them very carefully and with intelligence. The Mansabdar units are more stalwart than their corresponding units and they have a special Indian passive ability called Imperial Service, which enhances the combat stats, speed and hit points of all nearby similar units.

The Mansabdar units are not upgradable to Disciplined, Honored or Exalted level, but they can receive some upgrades from arsenal technologies, Home City cards shipments (such as TEAM cards from ally players) and some Native/Religious upgrades at the trading posts.

The Mansabdar units are also shipped from the Indian Home City with the Regiment cards. Those cards ship at the town center a group of units with a Mansabdar unit as the leader of the regiment. For example: the home city card Sowar Regiment will send a group of Sowar, and a Mansabdar Sowar, with an extra villager (due the Indian special civilization ability), getting ready to assault your enemies without the request of a Charminar Gate wonder if you can’t get it, but you must be careful with this, because if you Mansabdar Zamburak gets killed in combat and you don’t have a Charminar Gate wonder, your Mansabdar is gone for good.

Trainable units
The following Mansabdar units can be trained from the Charminar Gate. They include:

Shipments

 * Colonial Age: 2 Sowars.
 * Fortress Age: 1 Mahout Lancer.
 * Industrial Age: 2 Mahout Lancers.
 * Imperial Age: 3 Mahout Lancers.

​Home City upgrades

 * TEAM Improved Buildings - Unlocked with a Level 10 Indian Home City and is sent in the Discovery Age. It provides a bonus of +25% to Indian buildings, but this stacks with the +40% (Improved Buildings) available to other civilizations for a total allied bonus of 65%.
 * Advanced Wonders - Unlocked with a Level 25 Indian Home City and is sent in the Discovery Age. It increases the hit points of Wonders (such as the Charminar Gate) by 50%, decreases build time by 25% (from 120 seconds to 90) and ships one Villager or two Sepoys.

Religious upgrades

 * Flying Buttress (Jesuit)] - +20% building hit points.

History
"Located in the City of Hyderabad, a former capital city of India, the Charminar Gate was built in 1591 at the center of the city to commemorate the eradication of a plague. At the place where Emperor Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah prayed for an end to the plague, he vowed to erect a mosque if his prayer were granted. When the plague ended, he built the mosque. The structure became known as Charminar because of its four characteristic minarets (“char,” meaning four, and “minar,” meaning spires). Each minaret has four stories, each of which opens into a plaza. Four is a number of significance in Islam. In this case, each of the four pillars represents a different aspect of knowledge. When India became a British colony, the gate served as a storage facility for liquor and opium. The domes at the top of the gate offer unobstructed views of the city - a city once offered up in hopeful prayer by a distraught emperor."