I have done well with oiler. Here is how I played it.

Fascist (duh) farm start. Finance buildings with bushels (again duh), build roughly 10% of non-CS buildings as rigs. Slowly increase % of rigs as set goes on. DO NOT SELL OIL YET. Start buying casher techs. Don't ignore agri tech if it's cheap, but don't try too hard to get it. It will help but early on focus more on getting land and defending it. This is literally the only non-techer strat that I don't advocate "all of it" as being the right amount of tech. When grabbing/warring/etc escalates, oil goes up. By the time I hit 10k acres I was roughly 50/50 rigs/farms, still only selling bushels to grow. When oil spiked - and you definitely need to get lucky on the market having an oil spike - I had a bunch of oil ready to sell, and didn't build any more farms for a while. I built more and more rigs, only now I stockpiled my bushels. In this particular set, oil did well enough that I tore my farms down, and stocked in a more traditional fashion. When the oil market crashed, I switched to theo and destocked, then did some light reselling at the end. This was good enough to win a low level tourney game, IIRC, shortly after the move to EE, or maybe shortly before, I get those details confused.