Ok. Stop. You're implying that rearranging the inventory per mission is an integral part of having a real inventory system. It's not. Even in Apocalypse the equipment layouts were soldier specific, so it remained in between missions. Only issue left by Apocalypse, which could've been easily solved, was that ammo didn't automatically refill from base storage post-mission. Nobody's saying to clone the system, all issues included. We've learned a lot since the early 90s that wasn't just dumbing down. You can fix these issues.
True, true. I admit that the existing system is less than it might be.
You could follow a supply ship to an alien base. Can you do that here?
Nope.
And more than that, the point is their activities really happened in the world, they weren't randomly generated when the game decided to give you something to do. For example, in this game, I got a VIP mission. The first time it was a scientist escort. Then I reloaded and now it was a politician arrest. The mission wasn't the result of what the aliens were doing, but was simply randomly generated when x amount of days passed.
Didn't UFOEE missions work the same way? As far as I could tell, the success or failure of their missions had no impact on their campaign. In fact,the only difference between, say, Alien Research, Alien Harvest, and Alien Abduction is the points value for the Alien Score, which only affects your funding. It'd be really neat if destroying all their research ships resulting in them deploying troops less optimized for anti-human combat or something, but as it is the missions system is basically the game waiting a bit and then rolling a d10 to decide what to throw at you. Admittedly, the Alien Base thing was neat.
And you do, in fact, still get UFO landings from time to time- I just finished a mission where a large ship landed in the middle of nowhere and I raided it, just like I would've in the old xcom.
Also, note that I said "strategic layer". They're not really doing anything significant in the tactical map in either case. Like in the original they just wandered around and at most shot at civilians. Here they just stand around some spots and give you a shitty cutscene when they enter your FOV. Then again, you'd think they'd drop what they're doing when they see a Skyranger landing nearby and start hearing gunfire.
Actually, the aliens will wander around. Misleadingly, even when they wander into you, you'll get the same cutscene that makes it look like they were doing something (Sectoids and thin men will often be crouched over a body and look up in surprise) and only just noticed you, even if they literally just jumped through the window into your building.
Don't get me wrong, the original's proportions (and especially quantities) were questionable, but not anywhere near as fucking bad as this. "XCOM, you're our first and last line of defence! Here's your monthly allowance. You can make 3 medkits with this. Now fuck off.".
I admit, jet-fighters costing twice as much as soldiers is slightly sillier than jet-fighters costing ten times as much as soldiers. On the other hand, I can appreciate how the devs might've wanted to rebalance to make medkits more scarce, since in Enemy Unknown I seem to recall every soldier always having one.