I ran up against this problem just last night - the dreaded SimCity teammates. When I arrived on the zone, I didn't see many friendly faces, but I some interesting settings on Quir - 125 pop Narrows Random Civs Nomad Start 1.5 spd. Well, I don't play 1.5, but I have handled myself respectively well under those conditions recently, so I gave it a shot.
The random gods have been INCREDIBLY nice to me lately (I guess all things balance after that Carth/Carth/Cho/Per/Carth/Palmy/Cho/Palmy run!), and I got Shang! Even better, another teammate (I don't recall many names, as I'd never met any of these guys before, so I'll call him Orange), was also Shang (teams were Teal/Blue/Yellow vs. Orange/Red/Brown - me). The map gods were also very kind, indeed! I found, almost immediately, a L-shaped forest/berry patch, and went to work immediately, later finding some nearby elephants, another berry patch forest, and a bit further, gold/stone/forest. Yee-HA!
I was at 3, and found yellow at 5, and built on both sides of him (larger base between yellow & blue, but I hadn't seen blue as of yet). I tooled w/ about 23 vills and 12 fb's, and axer/slinger rushed him, (hitting the shoreline w/ 2 or 3 scout boats) wiping out his woodies, and forcing the rest to flee. I expanded the operation as I went to Bronze, all the while telling my pards what I was up to, and what I had seen.
I was greeted by a stony silence from both of them. I found some of blue's woodies at about 5:30 (further in), and used a mix of cav, cam, CA's, and a few stonies to maul them. I had upgraded to galleys, and found a blue gold/stone operation near 6, and wiped it out before a teal/blue navy managed to demolish all of my galleys.
Again, I got no word from either of my partners on what was up, and I researched writing, only to find orange under heavy teal chariot/CA attack. He resigned w/o comment or tribute.
Now was the first time I heard from red, asking me what to do. He was certainly not a newbie, but I felt this was a rather poor time to start with the yack-yack. He also began asking for help, which I was unable to provide, as I was fighting a 2v1. I ironed, and used ballistas, towers, and scythes (& a few priests) to fend up wave after wave of blue & teal scythes & swords, and managed to push blue back into teal's area. My score was about 700 at the time, and the next highest, teal, was about 520. Perhaps that's why red was expecting more support from me, I don't know.
Soon, I got some unexpected & unsolicited tribute from him, and looked over to see yellow towers and teal scythes (maybe 5 of the former and 10 of the latter) in his town. He resigned. (At least he tribbed me!) I fought on for maybe 15 more minutes, but the scythes kept pushing me off the gold. I had rebuilt my galley fleet, and now had about 15 Fire Galleys (great for roasting those coastline operations, provided there's no seige present!), so I now had all the waterways, but at this stage, there were few fish, and most of the villie operations had already been forced inland. The scythe hordes grew and came wave after wave; I was overwhelmed, and resigned, but I do not believe I can attribute our loss to my not supporting red (or orange, for that matter).