UPDATE: Played the game for another few hours and this time focused on meeting the needs of my people... turns out I WAS missing something (obviously) and have now got up to needing oil and am trying to figure it out! I love this older game style where things like this take time to actually work out, rather than the game simply holding your hand through its entirety. I clearly underestimated the game before, brilliant!
The idea of having not just specific miracles do certain things, but also have the combination of miracles and different terrain types yeilding completely different results, therefore necessitating a varied landscape is fantastic.
Its worth mentioning still that it feels overly easy to keep cities on your side, although im sure that if I play this save long enough that could very well change.
I am very much looking forward to where this game will go.