Artillery was anther thing I'd like to have seen changed a bit. I never liked how units with multiple "pogs" all had the same drift direction. Also, a miss should have always missed. Too many artillery pieces were really easy to hit with if you "center dotted" the intended target.
The ICE mechs themselves didn't bother me. Story wise, they did make sense. There was just so damn many. To make it worse, when the fans made it very clear they'd had more than enough, but wizkids decided to stay the course and just keep pumping them out.
Part of the problem with the seemingly endless torrent of ICE was that the minis had already been designed and produced by the time player reaction had solidified ... not counting the general outrage of CBT players, of course ... I can't remember exactly how far ahead they had lined out, but the bottom line was probably the bottom line for that ... I'm assuming that the ICE 'mechs were intended to be phased out as the game went on, anyway ... I do get a kick out of them, but did not enjoy paying $10.00 for an ICE mech plus Mobile HQ, Peasant company, and standard foot ...
Artillery ... needed to be costed at about 2-3 times the points, at least, considering its effect on the game ... I would have liked to see spotters used. Maybe disallow the armor piercing function? Create a side board for the artillery/HQ section, so that it's off the main field?
Base sizes and scaling ... would have been cool to have even a little more variety in base sizes, so that the Behemoth II could be on a different size stand than a Fox armored car -- and be scaled properly. And maybe get a secondary weapon. Same with the 'mechs ... give the heavy and assaults larger bases with more clicks and maybe even a tertiary weapon.
Terrain could have been provided in boosters (cardboard or even just paper). Pre-printed maps (that are actually tourney-legal 3 x 3 size) would have been nice, too. I kind of like those that were in the later battleforce packs. They're just too small. Terrain sets should have come out sooner ... and maybe accompanied by some cheap / free downloadable buildings, as was done for Dropzone Commander (their buildings are even N-scale!). Wizkids already had downloadable terrain templates, so I can't imagine it would have been that much more trouble to generate. And it would have helped sell the game at the store level ...
Maybe faction boxes early on could have blunted the effect of the blind-buy boosters ... say each faction box has the faction leader's mech, a mobile HQ, a repair vehicle, MASH, combat techs, coolant truck (so support units don't have to take up space in boosters), a couple of faction specific 'mechs, faction dice ...
To woo CBT people, put out a few House and Clan non-blind buys featuring characters and hardware from the Civil War or Jihad era ... kind of like they did late in the run with the pilot cards of Kai, Jaime Wolf, Phelan Ward, and Natasha Kerensky.
The problem with how the fans took Dark Age wasn't a problem with how Wizkids presented it, it was that way too many fans of CBT decided to immediately write it off and then cherry pick the worst aspects to represent DA as a whole.
But this thread isn't for CBT fans to yet again complain about how Clix was terrible, it's to talk about how clix could've been designed differently from a game perspective.
Right - while the game had a number of ... hinky design aspects, it was -- and is -- fun to play. If it came back out, I would get back in in a cold second. Probably not in tournament play, but still ... It's frustrating that the initial marketing of the clix game went off the way it did ...