I bought it there and then, and have been playing fairly solidly it for the past two days.
It's not as good as Patrician III.
They haven't ruined it — it's still quite fun to play — but they've changed the emphasis and removed some of the better parts. There are some improvements I like, for example being able to choose a different number of cities, but Pirates are much more of a pain and you can't even capture their ships (which are otherwise hard to come by). You can't even name your ships, only your convoys, which is odd.
Anyway, as you're not interested in a Hanseatic trading game I'm not going to go into details. However, I thought I'd blog it because of this:
It's supposed to be a sheep farm, but "sheep" is "heep" in Patrician IV. It's a localisation error, as is this:
I wouldn't care, but those instructions don't actually work — you have to hit escape to get out of it...
Still, it's only crashed to desktop once, unlike CivV...