Civilization – disable science sharing in the team

civilization-5

I'm trying to play a cooperative game of Civilization V – that is, a multiplayer game with two humans (all the rest AIs) with both of us sharing the same team. However, I discovered that when we are on the same team we apparently completely share the science progression between us – giving us what seems to be a huge advantage over the AI.

Other aspects such as culture progression and international relations don't seem to be shared, only sight and war status – and I'm fine with those.

Is there any way to disable this science sharing?

Best Answer

It is not possible to disable science sharing.

The game does scale the science requirements of technologies when teamed up, so that a team of 2 needs to generate 150% science to be at the same advance rate of a single player as evidenced by looking at the tech tree in each case:

Team Size | Agriculture | Pottery |Sailing | Future Tech 1 | Scaling
----------|-------------|---------|--------|---------------|--------
1         | 14          | 25      | 40     | 7001          | 100%
2         | 21          | 37      | 60     | 10501         | 150%

Obviously this scaling is somewhat below what you would expect, and does give something of an advantage. The best workaround for this is to team-up the AI players into pairs so the playing field is more balanced.

Also remember that the AI will receive difficulty bonuses based on the lowest difficulty out of all the human players, which can impact on their science rate.