Apr 4th 2013, 2:37:12
Oil tech is unnecessary to accomplish this. The reason oiler is not a viable strat (in most cases) is because 1 or 2 countries can produce enough to fulfill the demand of the entire server.
For instance on Primary server in the past 24 hours 8.6M barrels were purchased. Assuming 54 turns per day, this is the production of 45,502 acres of a Fascist's Oil Fields. The largest country in Primary is currently 46k+ acres. If one of the 30 largest countries chose to play an oiler it would almost double the supply and significantly lower the price.
It is safe to say that if you want a strategy to be viable you need to allow at least 7% of the server to be able to choose it any given set. Of course on servers with large scale wars more oilers will be necessary when wars are in place. So it is hard to balance the two server types.
With that said I do think that demand for oil should be increased to allow for more oilers. It may take 1 or 2 sets of high prices before enough players balance the market down to the prices we have grown to expect.
The lack of oil tech is actually what makes the oiler strategy unique and for that reason alone, oil tech should not be added.
