Of trading games from this era, most implemented hand-holding features like indicating when prices were good or bad, and some even had straight up auto-trade functionality where you just told a ship to start making you money. These features eventually infected Patrician IV. Patrician III manages to wrap in-depth trading and career features into a simple and easy to understand package. You quickly get the hang of things; yet you still find things to improve on after hundreds of hours. The only real flaw in the game in my opinion, is that after you get rich, trading becomes trivial enough that it can be difficult to motivate yourself to keep optimizing your routes. It's not uncommon for career/progression games to end this way and it's not bad in Patrician III but it is worth noting. Many multiplayer games I've had with friends only start to fizzle out after 50-60 hours; singleplayer games can go for much longer.
I love Patrician 3 and I have played thousands of hours of it throughout the years and we're a group of friends who get the urge to play together every few years and have done so for almost 20 years. Everyone of us bought Patrician 4 originally and we all went back to Patrician 3. There are a few improvements but the main issue for most of us were the introduction of auto-trade. Why anyone would want to play a trading game with automated trading? Like a driving game with self-driving cars. The switch to 3D graphics is also not an improvement in my opinion. While not a horrible game, the fact that Patrician 3 is a better experience (in my opinion at least) makes this a pass for me.
