The Real Coin/PP Rankings and Why Your "Obvious" Factory Choice Is Probably Wrong
If you've been building your economy around "what has the highest sell price" or "what has the best bonus in my region," I want to show you why that reasoning quietly loses you money by using real numbers from my own factories.
The Metric That Actually Matters
Every guide tells you to chase high prices and big bonuses. Almost none of them tell you the one number that actually determines whether a factory is worth running: gold per Production Point (coin/PP).
Sell price tells you what the market pays. Coin/PP tells you what you actually earn for the work you put in. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most players are quietly bleeding efficiency.
Case Study #1: The Fish Factory That Looked Perfect
I had a fish factory sitting in Northeastern Greenland with a +60% production bonus which is about as good as location bonuses get. On paper, this should have been a great factory.
The recipe: 40 PP → 1 fish. Market price at the time: ~3.26/unit.
Real yield: 3.26 ÷ 40 = 0.0815 gold/PP.
That's below average market wage (~0.13/PP). Even at a near-maximum bonus, I was earning less than I would working a random job. The bonus wasn't the problem, the recipe was. Forty raw PP for one unit of output is a bad conversion rate no matter where you're standing.
This means a strong location bonus cannot rescue a fundamentally bad recipe ratio. Check the PP-to-output ratio before you fall in love with a bonus percentage.
Case Study #2: The Chain That Beat Both Its Own Halves
I compared two setups using real market prices:
Sell raw wood
Straight sell price
0.089
Buy wood, run paper
0.181 (sell) − 0.089 (buy)
0.092
Wood feeding your own paper factory
0.181 (sell) − internal transfer cost (~0)
~0.181 minus only your own production cost
Running wood and paper as two separate, market-facing businesses only nets you a 0.003/unit edge for paper over just selling raw wood, basically a wash. But feeding your own wood factory directly into your own paper factory skips the market spread entirely. No buy price, no sell friction on the input side. Any surplus wood you don't need still sells at full price, so nothing is wasted.
This means, two mediocre-looking factories can outperform one "obviously better" factory, if you connect them instead of running them independently.
The Model to Actually Use:
Before committing a factory slot, ask three questions in this order:
What's the recipe ratio? PP-in vs. units-out. This sets your ceiling before any bonus is applied.
What's the current market price, not the price you remember from last week? Margins move.
Can this feed another factory you own instead of hitting the open market? If yes, recalculate assuming zero buy-side cost on that leg of the chain.
Only after those three do location bonuses and hiring decisions matter, they're multipliers on a number that might already be bad.
Quick Gut-Check for Your Own Factories
Take 30 seconds per factory and calculate: (sell price) ÷ (PP required per unit). Compare that against current average market wage on warerastats.io's wages page. If a factory is sitting below average wage even with a full bonus stack, it's not a location problem, it's a recipe problem, and no relocation will fix it.
Numbers in this article were pulled from live factories at AE5, level 19. Your specific figures will vary.
The point isn't to copy these exact values, it's to run the same check on your own lineup before you assume "high price" or "good bonus" means "good factory."