Difficult to determine the full picture. Dull gameplay.
However, I still found it very awkward to play the trading game, the main problem was that I found it hard to determine key trading information without wading through poorly designed pop-ups. All the pop-ups are filled with unintuitive icons with tooltips that are slow to appear.
I found the following particularly bad:
1. Getting data on each factory type you have in any given town was a nightmare. You have to literally zoom into the town and find the factories (which are not distinguished from the dozen AI factories) and click on them. I had developed 3 towns and it was already getting out of hand remembering which of the 20 factory types I had built in each town.
2. The most used screen in the game - the commodities pop-up is so small it forces user to scroll the mouse wheel in order to see all the prices .... when i am playing on 1600x1050 ...awful.
3. Way too much clicking to get key information. Finding out what was causing production holdups or reviewing your task list involves going to some obscure menu and clicking 1 of 6 tabs
4. Sea combat - just so bad...my ships would bug out and permanently stop shooting if I touched any of the control options such as cannon shot type - my best results were just DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING and let the AI handle swim the ships in circles.
It is also just a very dull game, maybe games have moved on since the Age of Sail / Pirates games back in the day, but my advice - stay clear of this one.