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.

To clarify, before Zorp comes and yells at me about tech again: It is not bad to get agri tech if you play the exact style I just outlined. It will spike your production bigtime on your farms. It will not help your oil, though, and it tends to be expensive early when you need to be focusing on buying jets and building your land. You can sell it back if oil is good enough to tear farms down, so it acts as a stockpile - one that generates interest. It is more of a "if I have extra dough" purchase than "I gotta have it, make room in the budget" purpose like a primary strat tech.