Team synergy

[op89x]

First, let me apologize if this question has been asked before; I did search and couldn't find it.

Anyway, myself and two friends are very new to the game. I have 87 hours in, and that's more than anyone else. Those who have played for a while surely know that 87 hours is not enough time to play all the civs and leaders, and certainly not enough to play most of them more than once.

Because we're so new, we're trying out random civs and starting at the easiest difficulty and working up, always playing as a team of three. This has made things very easily for us so far, so we haven't given strategy much thought, but during one of our earlier games, I noticed that my civ, Scythia, worked really well with my friend, playing Sumeria.

We were attacking Kongo from either side, and as we met in the middle, it made a huge difference. I was healing by picking off units we weakened, we shared XP and earned more promotions, which also healed us, and pillaging occasionally healed both of us. We agreed that if we played those civs again, we'd have a better strategy next time. However, my other friend, playing Japan, didn't seem equipped to help us in the same way. I was pumping out cavalry and pillaging everything, Sumeria was sharing the love, and Japan was hardly a military presence at all.

It got me thinking: are there some team compositions that work together with that kind of synergy? Civs/Leaders that mutually benefit one another when employing a certain strategy?

If you don't mind helping out some new people, could you suggest some team compositions that would be ideal for Domination, Culture, Religion, and Science? I'm especially interested in how religion would work in a team game.

The only annoying consideration is that I have the base game and all the pre-R&F DLC, while my other two friends have only the base game, Vikings, Aztec, and Australia DLCs; we wouldn't be able to have Persia and Nubia on the same team, for example.

Thanks for any suggestions, and sorry if this is a stupid question.

[gimmethegepgun]

Most of the civs are very self-absorbed, but a few work with others. Sumeria, as you said. Egypt gives bonuses to both sides of international trade routes. Arabia benefits a lot from people working together to get his religion in all their cities (extra science from that) and their religion's religious building can be bought by anyone with the religion for 10% normal faith price. Kongo gets to use all beliefs of the majority religion in their cities (some beliefs only work for the founder of the religion normally) which can give you a decent economic advantage.