That was Bill's advice in the manual, along with some gamesmanship to try and convince other players that you meant to get a river plot, but ended up with a mountain plot due to bumping the joystick...

Mine was basically ignoring all the mining, get as many food plots as possible, and focus on energy and food. Worked well against the computer, they believed there will be enough supply. But I actually bought out the warehouse and then drove prices extremely high.

So I sold food energy at a higher pricepoint than the ore. Often the AI players couldn't afford food / energy anymore and therefore their production collapsed and they did not have enough food to have enough time to change the installations on their plots.

I tried to do that so many times and failed. Every game I played basically became a race to mine cristite.