yeah, factorio does feel like it models this pretty well doesn't it? especially with drones, because they are more flexible about where they go, so the bullwhi

yeah, factorio does feel like it models this pretty well doesn't it? especially with drones, because they are more flexible about where they go, so the bullwhip can more easily spread to physically-adjacent supply-chains. if you're not over-supplied, when a new spike in demand starts a whip through your factory, things can go nuts for quite a while. you get power surges. drones that were behaving beautifully before start flying in chaotic patterns due to under/over supply and making a bunch of dumb local decisions about storage boxes. stuff grinds to a halt for no apparent reason, only to discover that some random component has become a bottleneck for practically everything, and then it can quickly shift to something on the opposite side of your factory... in that sense, perhaps the biters help keep your factory more resistant. you have to deal with occasional component-losses and spikes in weapon demands, and if you don't handle them well enough you can get into an awful persistent struggling state.