Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency, and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual depth of these subjects as Kerbal Sp

Factorio only sort of deals with queuing theory, concurrency, and so on. Probably to the same extent relative to the actual depth of these subjects as Kerbal Space Program deals with aerospace concepts relative to what aerospace engineers do. But IMO that's not actually the hardest part of Factorio. The hardest part of Factorio is the same as for software engineering: how to build something that scales and where you can still reason about it. One of the big challenges after just "beating the game" is hitting specific scale targets (the community calls it megabase building), and the factory sizes needed to do that definitely reach the complexity limits of human brains, so many of these players start establishing design conventions and start writing down notes and documentation and calculations for themselves. I've definitely done things like using a stopwatch to measure roundtrip time for a train in order to calculate latency/throughput numbers for a supply chain in Factorio. But you rarely need to do more than back of the napkin math to be effective.