Abbasid dynasty Still Underpowered Compared to All Civilizations

[Croissantini]

They suffer from variantism.

All the boons Ayyubids got were suggestions that I made a long time ago and which seem to have been packed into a variant civilization to be sold to you rather than update the actual civilization. In other words, they’re selling you the same product twice.

Quotes from House of Wisdom -- One landmark to replace them all

@Croissantini

Each “wing” should immediately grant a bonus. Say picking the military wing, some war trumphets go off and you’ve immediately gained the Boot Camp technology, or an entirely new bonus that makes your infantry units more interesting somehow.

@Croissantini

Golden Age building influence and rewards could be more interesting. The rewards grant flat bonuses that the Abbasids have enough of in their House of Wisdom technologies. It should be a tangible reward, one that maybe unlocks an ability, a type of unit or building. One of the rewards could for example enhance the influence of fire armour. Since the House of Wisdom is placed so early, its influence rarely extends past your base. So maybe something like “Golden Age influence extends from any Town Center or Castle”, allowing for harder to kill Tower/Castle pushes–showing off that civilization bonus of building structures out of stone.

Because of the creation of Ayyubids, Abbasids are forever doomed to remain a tech based boom civilization, whose identity will rarely intersect with Ayyubid’s gameplay. The truth of variants is that their gameplay could’ve been baked into the original civilizations to solve some of their massive design flaws. Instead, we are sold isolate solutions that keep the legacy problems for base users and it has made the whole product that is Age of Empires 4 worse overall.