Disappointing in what way? Would you please explain your statement.
There weren't any levels for Soldiers in the original X-COM, so it could hardly be more flexible in that regard. There were some minor things you could do that slowly improve your soldier's stats over the course of the game, but reaching a certain stat level, such as improving the soldier's strength to 40, didn't mean he had gained a level.
That's because in a system that 'grows' characters organically, the concept of a 'level' is as meaningless as it is in reality. They improved their abilities - the rigid 'levelling' of RPG-inspired systems is not a goal to aim for, it's an intrinsically restrictive way of representing a continuous process of improving skills as a series of discrete gradations. Essentially, it's a step backwards, in the same way that I consider Shogun 2's addition of character levels that allow the player to select from paired options that increase one or other stat regressive compared with the organic character development of older Total War games, where you still get 3 star, 4 star etc. characters (indeed with a higher threshold than Shogun 2's 4-level system), but they develop in ways relevant to the actions they have performed. It also fosters the widespread gaming mentality that measures achievement by the 'level' your character reaches, which I've always seen as an unfortunate consequence of unimaginative game design rather than something to further encourage.
But my key concern is as I noted - the game's adoption of such generic genre standards as named levels, power-up skill trees and unit classes makes the end result feel, indeed, generic - losing much of the character of the original game in the process. Nothing in anything I've posted suggests I expect it to be a bad game; but I have no expectation that it will be an "X-COM" game in the sense of the original.
As you point out, in the original X-COM, having Officer-ranked soldiers was purely a function of the total number of soldiers you had, and when you had the proper number of soldiers, the game would choose who to promote, and as you said, it often promoted sub-par soldiers. Even though the original X-COM was a very good game, it could have been even better if it had let the player choose which soldiers to promote. At this point, do we know that there will not be a requirement in XCOM: EU to have X number of soldiers before you can have Officers?
Levels are named according to officer rank - it's remarkably unlikely that the game will include a system that will arbitrarily prevent certain soldiers from levelling up.
And in the original X-COM, since your initial base had a bunch of Scientists & Engineers for Research & Manufacturing, getting enough soldiers to have officers often meant building a 2nd base and staffing it with 10 - 12 Rookies, so that the soldiers in your main base who were running the Missions could get promoted. I don't think that made the game feel more real, and having to have a bunch of Rookies sitting in another base doing nothing just to get officer promotions certainly did nothing for the atmosphere of the game.
Why would you even do that? There was no benefit other than theme to having ranked soldiers, so why maximise soldiers to obtain ranks you don't need for gameplay reasons? And by late in the game I usually had at least three squads with transports anyway to maximise the missions I could run. Though even doing that, with the larger squad sizes in the original game you were still usually going to end up with a mix of officer classes and supporting squaddies - does a squad with 6 colonels really feel less realistic to you than that? Notwithstanding that so much of X-COM's feel was about seeing your characters grow. If the colonel is by default the best field soldier in your force (which is not itself very reflective of reality), then if he's the one getting all the kills there's nothing very interesting happening storywise, compared with the squaddie who performs above his station or the eternal sergeant who sets a good example for his men in every mission.
IMO, having abilities to choose as your soldiers advance in rank is a major improvement over the original X-COM.
I'd say that having abilities would be a major improvement in principle, but the way they're allocated is, once again, pandering to a rather unfortunate genre standard. I'd much rather see something along the lines of the old Total War system, where abilities are assigned based largely on the way the character plays during the game (in that game, for instance, a general who leads a successful attack with a predominantly cavalry force might be rewarded with a 'cavalry commander' ability).
I'm not sure how you can say this when there are four more ranks to be gained and seven more abilities that we don't know which could be chosen. The optimal method for promoting your soldiers are still TDB, and won't be determined until the full game is released and people get a chance to start playing.
The very idea of having an "optimal build" is anathema to strategic and tactical flexibility - and given the style of game X-COM is, it is unlikely that specific missions will require radically different set-ups. There are already so many games out there that revolve around levelling up and finding the right 'build order', why would I want one with the X-COM brand name if it does nothing new?
I get the unfortunate sense that you have already decided that this will be a bad game based on a too short Demo that revealed very little about the actual game.
See above, and indeed my past posts. In fact I've already mentioned several times that I expect the game to be quite good, and moreover that the demo is plainly unrepresentative. But a good game whose selling point over a classic game I already own is that it adopts a standard set of generic mechanics from a bunch of modern games I already own seems an exercise in futility, and I'm not seeing anything in Let's Plays, previews or anything else that suggests the new X-COM game is going to be anything more than a turn-based version of Dawn of War II, only with fewer abilities for your characters.
The Bullet Swarm ability (firing primary weapon 1st doesn't end turn) implies that a Heavy Soldier with this ability would be able to perform two offensive actions in his turn. That gives a Heavy several options on his turn: fire LMG twice, fire LMG/throw Grenade, fire LMG/fire Rocket Launcher, throw Grenade/fire Rocket Launcher. Combine Bullet Swarm with Shredder Rocket at the Sargent level, and you could fire a Standard Rocket and a Shredder Rocket on the same turn. And I'd be surprised if there weren't two or three of the seven abilities which we don't know which would improve Rocket Launcher skill even more.
You're missing the point I intended, perhaps because I didn't quote the section of the 'Some Things You Should Know About the Demo' article that this was a response to. The claim there - and in the Let's Play, as I recall - was that the abilities needed to be selected in a way that maximised their abilities for the unit as a whole, not for the individual soldier. If it's all about finding the way that the heavy can become the best possible heavy, that's uninteresting and no different from your bog-standard Diablo clone. If it's about selecting abilities for your Heavy whose utility will vary depending on whether your squad is balanced, whether is composed mainly of assault personnel, whether it's focused on snipers and other heavies - that's when it becomes an interesting mechanic that presents genuine options. The way to be the best heavy will always be the same if all you need to consider is the character in isolation.
A Sargent Heavy with Holo-Targeting & Suppression Abilities can pin down a target with the suppression fire, giving that target a -30 Aim penalty, and granting all other allied soldiers on the mission a +10 Aim bonus on the target. Again, I'll be surprised if there aren't other abilities down the line that improve this line of Abilities.
Holo-targeting is another annoyance simply for the name - where does this technology come from without research? X-COM was intended as a unit of basic modern human soldiers, with limited special equipment at their inception. The new, small teams of magic superpower soldiers seem to have less in common with X-COM than with the X-Men.
