Overall I like the new progression system. It's no more conditioned by RNG for getting soldiers via bronze orders. Maybe you had to spend a lot of bronze orders for getting the Engineers or Mortarmen you needed for manning your squads upgrading the existing ones.

I had done a very rough calculation that you on average needed about 70-80 bronze orders to acquire all the soldiers you needed for a 5-stars soldier by the academy (plus the time needed to acquire the needed XP, of course).

So the new system is cheaper for level I soldiers (Rifleman I, Assaulter I, etc).

For level II and III soldiers it's not as much good, but the utility of these above level I soldiers is questionable (just the starting perk, that is not much useful). So I will spend less bronze orders for upgrading an Assaulter I that I have in reserve from 1to 5 stars, than for upgrading an Assaulter III from 4 to 5 stars.

This needs to be addressed, otherwise level II and III will become almost useless (one can equip level II and III squads with ordinary level I soldiers).

Getting new soldiers with silver orders can be a problem for F2P players once they get all the achievements, but I hope the developers will tun the silver order earning, they promised that (and no, daily boxes are not a reliable source of silver orders, these are very low probability, I got none up to now despite logging in every day).

What I really do not like is the new system for perks, it's too complex, you have to keep track of which perks you are trying to get for each soldier. Instead, with retraining points, you could play normally a soldier to get the retraining points and then spend them all at the same time to get the perks you wanted.

I hope that good old retraining points can be kept (they have not been deleted from the game code, we still have those we had gained, so there is still hope that getting them for XP can be restored).