> A shortage in real life causes critical issues for real people. A shortage in Factorio does not.
An iron shortage in Factorio causes my iron plates to run out. My iron plates feed the steel furnaces. The steel furnaces build ammo. My ammo is automatically belted to my defensive garrisons. Then the bugs completely wipe out my base, because I was out of ammo.
Going backwards: Understanding why I'm out of ammo requires me to understand why I'm out of steel, which requires me to understand why I'm out of iron, which requires me to walk over to the mines and realize the mine is out.
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Now lets see what happens with buffers.
Understanding why I'm out of ammo: wait, I'm not out of ammo. I've got thousands of ammo buffered up right now. As such, I don't fix the problem for 2 or 3 hours.
2 or 3 hours later: my ammo runs out. I then begin the process of figuring out that I'm out of iron. When you have buffers, its hard to tell where your bottlenecks are: buffers make it _seem_ like you have plenty of supply, when in reality, the iron mine ran out a long time ago.
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Now look at real life. The same thing happens. Toyota had a large buffer of critical chips so that it could feed its factory for months after the chip shortage started (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...).
Oh right. Lol, guess what? Woops, Toyota has run out of chips (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/business/toyota-productio...)
An iron shortage in Factorio causes my iron plates to run out. My iron plates feed the steel furnaces. The steel furnaces build ammo. My ammo is automatically belted to my defensive garrisons. Then the bugs completely wipe out my base, because I was out of ammo.
Going backwards: Understanding why I'm out of ammo requires me to understand why I'm out of steel, which requires me to understand why I'm out of iron, which requires me to walk over to the mines and realize the mine is out.
----
Now lets see what happens with buffers.
Understanding why I'm out of ammo: wait, I'm not out of ammo. I've got thousands of ammo buffered up right now. As such, I don't fix the problem for 2 or 3 hours.
2 or 3 hours later: my ammo runs out. I then begin the process of figuring out that I'm out of iron. When you have buffers, its hard to tell where your bottlenecks are: buffers make it _seem_ like you have plenty of supply, when in reality, the iron mine ran out a long time ago.
------
Now look at real life. The same thing happens. Toyota had a large buffer of critical chips so that it could feed its factory for months after the chip shortage started (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...).
Oh right. Lol, guess what? Woops, Toyota has run out of chips (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/business/toyota-productio...)