This could have been a truly great game but it's spoiled by clunky controls and excessive micro-management.
You start of as a small trader in a town in the 14th century Hanseatic league, which consisted mainly of Baltic and North Sea trading ports. You are given a small amount of capital and ship and with this you can build up a huge empire that spans about twenty cities. Almost all trade is done by sea and you go from port to port buying goods where they are cheap and selling them where they are expensive, but it's not quite as easy as that.
Firstly when you start off you don't know where goods are cheap or expensive until you visit that town, although you are given clues by being told what towns produce and what they need most. Then there are pirates who harass you and steal your cargo or even your ships if you try to fight them. As you trade more and more with each town they give you permission to build there, which allows you to build a trading office so that you can click on that town without visiting it with your ships. It also allows you to build that town's specific production buildings. There are about twenty different production buildings ranging from wheat farms and fishing huts to breweries and workshops and each town can build about seven of the different buildings. This means that all towns require supply from about three to four other towns and its up to you to try to manage the supply process.
In addition to the trading and business aspect there is a political dimension to the game. In your town you can become popular and respected by supplying goods to the people and you can be appointed a councilor and stand to be Mayor. Becoming Mayor allows you to manage your towns defences, tax and finances and also deal with the Prince. You can rise still further within the Hanseatic league and become Alderman which is like chief Executive which gives you lots of enjoyable missions to carry out.
There is also a military aspect to the game but it's not terribly important overall, so I'll not bother going into it.
Although, as I say, this game has all the ingredients for a very good game, it's somewhat spoiled by the clunky controls and excessive micro-management required. Automated trading is the perfect example of this. Although it allows for an amazing variety of different scenarios and tweaks it also requires an unbelievable amount of micro-management to set up and then to keep it running smoothly. Automated trading should make the game much easier to play and free up your time for other things but on the whole it doesn't really and thus you are constantly having to manage it and tweak it. This means expanding your empire becomes extremely tedious and time consuming rather than enjoyable and satisfying. However there are still plenty of good things like the missions you get when you become Mayor and Alderman, which still make the game worthwhile and enjoyable.