I think it's designed so that it doesn't hamper situational awareness and makes you guesstimate the bearing as a soldier would do in a combat situation. I could well be wrong, however. Otherwise, we should probably wait for the Advanced Combat Environment (ACE) mod to be ported over if you're a user of that.

In order to be effective in combat, one must be able to promptly and accurately read and announce enemy bearing information. It is important that we are actually able to read the compass bearing numbers and not just NESW.

i do and will be using ACE but when i play vanilla SP or with friends who don't use ACE i want to read my bearings. Also @Bashkire if you were a real soldier you could just look down at your compass and be like "oh there's 330 and there's the enemy"

The compass size was increased drastically in the latest beta patches of Arma 2 OA, the same could be done with the A3 compass too... The exact bearings are very important to many players, so I consider this as necessary tweak.

i have no problems reading numbers on the compass but i do agree that would be good to have it a bit bigger

I might be wrong but isn't the compass size locked to the interface size here? Try setting interface to large under options and check what happens.

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=797 Related

Duplicate of #0000462.