I was thinking of buying Patrician 1, so I tested the more...accessible Amiga version first and and found out you can't choose Bergen as hometown. :-(
Being from Bergen - the only Hansa town with a surviving Hansa Kontor - myself, this is kind of disappointing.

How are the other Patrician games?
Can you start in Bergen?
Any annoying action mini-games that ruined so many other strategy/trading games, like for example Ports of Call where you have to land ship manually, or Star Control 2 with its annying twitchy ship to ship combat?

Also, are the different towns in the later games different or are they just generic towns with no character?

Bergen still can't be your hometown in P2 or 3. But you can place a contor there, IIRC. So you can at least built there all kind of stuff from houses, over social welfare stuff up to raw material producing places or workshops processing those raw materials.

On the whole P3 is much deeper and better then P1, in every regard. As for minigames - the sea battles are still there, RTS, but on a real map,too...can become hectic if you have more then 1 ship to command. You can automate them, but then you will have to live with what the AI does for you (though you can avoid most fights or damage by either using light ships without weapons to flee any danger or heavy armed convoys detracting any pirats) Defensive land battles are under your command, too - if you are city major too...but you only have a few options to actively influence the comabt...

Towns differ mainly in terms of their geographic location (river city? land trade route available or later buildable? Danger of harbor freezing in winter?), the goods they provide or can process, the shape of the town map, the status of the city (hanseatic league city, Hanseatic contor or hanseatic factorei (spelling?)...

Finally there are several building styles of the houses...also Churches and Town Halls look different everywhere - which has no gameplay impact, though.

Thanks for answers.
Not quite what I had hope for, though, but I may eventually give P3 a shot.

While I don't know quite how the gog version works, at least in the disk version I have there's a (fairly basic) game editor that comes with the game. I'm guessing that if you made an identical map with that, you'd be able to set Bergen as a possible hometown. Anyone who's actually used the editor can correct me if I'm wrong, though.

pi4t is right - you can indeed make Bergen a Hanse city, meaning you can start a game there. In the map editor, you just need to click on Bergen and set the type to "Hanse city".

I don't think Bergen would be a good starting choice in P1 anyway. It's a poor town, and there are no quick & close trading routes. You definitely want to get involved with the fur trade at some point in the game, but for your home town you really need something with more neighbours and a better economy.

Luebeck is the obvious choice. Visby is my favourite, though.

The reason Bergen can't be used as a starting town is that it's not one of the central Hansa towns. The game is just as much about politics as it is about trading, and Bergen does not have a seat in the hanseatic council.