Heh, so my perfectly logical approach ~cough~ of moving the infantry unit to the planned location, hitting the build key and expecting the airfield to appear underneath the unit was err demonstrating my Civ indoctrination , must pay more attention to the cursor in future.
I've used produce wealth a few times, it just feels wrong to do so in the first turns of the game. Blame more Civ (& settlers & Gal Civ & etc) indoctrination for the "grab everything in sight, explore, grab more, especially cities" mentality of mine and I'm a "quaility over quantity technologist" so I'd gotten into the habit of running a per turn money deficit to get an early lead in the technology battle. Which was working against two AI players, looks like I need a strategy shift for three
Thanks dm and Brit, going to fool around with the CMSF demo today and figure out what is going to be the treat for Xmas.