I'm glad that you liked the atmosphere. I am sorry that you are confused with the gameplay, I'll try to explain how to play in depth.
- You have the main building. It needs oil, and if it doesn't have oil - you lose (there is "Pressure" indicator that shows you how much oil is flowing into the main building).
- You can place buildings. When you try to place it on a smokey-thing, it will become an oil pump. If you try to place it on the plain ground - it will be an oil tank. Oil pump, as you can guess, pumps oil. Oil tank serves as conjunction and it may store a small amount of oil in case of anything.
- You can connect two buildings with pipes. It allows oil to flow from node with more oil to the node with less. You need it to feed your main building with oil.
- You can build simultaneously only small amount of buildings (at start only 1). When you try to place multiple buildings at the same moment, the ones closer to the main building will be constructed first. Buildings are not functional when they are in the process of construction.
- Buildings can be damaged by various disasters (UFO, asteroids, tornadoes). Damaged buildings are not functional, but they will be repaired automatically in the same order as described in the previous part. It means that you might want to have multiple ways for oil to flow from every pump to the main building. Also you want to have more pumps, than your main building currently needs because they will eventually get damaged and stop working for some time.
- Long pipes are easier to get damaged, so it is usually better not to connect far pumps directly to the main building, but to make intermediate oil tanks and connect through them.
- Pipes can not intersect each other or other nodes (including smoking oil deposits)
- You can upgrade buildings. Every upgrade gives your buildings more HP and also pumps will pump more oil. Main building also can be upgraded. Every upgrade of the main building gives you opportunity to construct more buildings simultaneously, but it will also consume more oil per second.
- The goal is to upgrade the main building to level 9
I hope it will help you to figure out the gameplay (if you will give it a try again).