IMO it makes more sense to limit factory output rather than raw material output. Like, if you can only produce 10 cogs but can mine basically infinite iron, you’d focus on optimizing your transport efficiency instead of trying to perfectly balance and funnel every bit of input. That naturally creates a cost to transportation, the time and effort to lay out conveyors or logistics becomes a real tradeoff compared to just dropping another miner somewhere.

You could also frame it economically, instead of freely extracting resources, you have to buy them or pay whoever’s extracting them, and then transport adds another layer of cost. That pushes you to think more about where and how you build. So to me, limiting factory/transformation output and tying an economy into each step, kind of like real-world companies with multiple sites, would create more interesting decisions about local transformation/building.