>As for SOA, one thing Factorio taught me was the value of back pressure. Why spend resources producing materials which aren't being consumed? Conveyer belts an

>As for SOA, one thing Factorio taught me was the value of back pressure. Why spend resources producing materials which aren't being consumed? Conveyer belts and movers show the value of backpressure nicely - when the belt is full, movers stop placing items on the belt. The factories stop producing, and thus stop consuming intermediate materials... all the way back to your miners. But the moment that belt starts to clear up, the entire mechanism swings back into work, with enough queued materials to ensure that you are not suddenly starved. This bit of your comment reminded me of The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement[1] by Eliyahu Goldratt. It's a great fictional story/book that does an excellent job of teaching about bottlenecks and the Theory of Constraints. Specifically how to identify them and eliminate them. [1] http://amzn.to/2miLjsH http://amzn.to/2miLjsH