Alpha Centauri was a great game (far better than Civ3 in many, many ways), but it just suffered from the problem of having a bunch of nameless nations that had even more nameless units once you were able to customize them to the level it allowed
If you read the quote, the new game is titled "Sid Meier's Pirates!", whereas the old game is "Pirates!" (or Pirates! Gold), and the original pirates has been universially recognized as one of the top games of all time... to be honest, it even stands there today, despite instability issues on newer os's (Gold actually works fairly decently on OS's up to 2k, I believe it has some issues with XP)