Game Info
Industrial era production-boosting building. Requires Workshop or Longhouse.
- +4
Production Production - +10% Production Production in this city
- 2 Engineer Specialist slots
- Consumes 1 Coal Coal
- +1 Happiness Happiness with Young Pioneers Order tenet
- +25% Science Science in this city with Worker's Faculties Order tenet
Strategy
The Factory is an Industrial Era building that greatly increases a city's production, combining a flat 
Production Production boost (+4), a percentage Production Production increase, AND 2 Engineer specialist slots. If you assign two specialists for a Factory, it gives you a total of +8 Production Production right away, plus 10% overall production! The problem is that this building requires Coal, one of the rarest resources in the game. Fortunately, only one unit in the entire game (the Ironclad, which is quickly replaced by the Destroyer in the Modern Era) requires this resource, making it available solely for Factories after the Modern Era. Still, you should carefully consider the availability of Coal for your empire, and build Factories first in your major production centers, saving Coal for later when you're able to trade more of it with other empires, or get it from City-States. A city must also have a Workshop (or Longhouse) before building a Factory.
Once you have built a Factory in one of your cities, it continues to provide its effects even if you lose access to your Coal supply (for example, if one of your Mines gets pillaged or a City-State that was granting you Coal stops being your ally).
Historical Info
A factory is a building which uses Industrial Age techniques to build stuff - cars, corsets, steel beams, fishing rods, or whatever. First appearing in a large scale in the 17th and 18th centuries, factories were more efficient than the small workshops or cottage industries they replaced, but perhaps less humane. Contrary to popular belief Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line; that was created in the 19th century in the mid-western US meat-packing industries. Beef carcasses were carried from station to station on an overhead trolley system at a steady pace; workers at each station would have a set amount of time to carve off their assigned chunk of meat before the carcass moved onto the next station. Working in a meat-packing plant was one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the history of American labor, and stories from this era can still horrify us today.