What bugs me is that units in the Napoleonic series (unlike in the sibling American Civil War series) are always facing hex corners, not hex sides. Thus they end up with a front angle of just two hexes. The front affects all kinds of things: 1) the unit's fire angle, 2) the angle from which the unit gets flank-charged, 3) the unit's zone of control (where it stops enemy movement), 4) the units retreat path (units can't retreat to either of their front hexes when they get defeated in close combat), 5) the unit's threat angle. Also, it should affect 6) the enfilade modifier for incoming fire, but I'm not sure if that's working in the Napoleonic series (it's hard to tell by the modifiers listed when you use "offmap" results for fire casualties).
The fundamental flaw with the very narrow front angle is that you CANNOT face your units in certain directions.
Have you ever tried to make an artillery unit face "up/north"? You can't. You can either face it up-right or up-left. And now the enemy approaches - of course directly from the north, wiggling his units right and left by one hex to jump out of your artillery's fire angle, forcing the artillery to constantly change its facing (non-horse artillery - even lousy threepounders - can't fire after changing its facing). The "jumping around" fire angles is very gamey and immersion-breaking. It's not what I want to be thinking about when playing a napoleonic battle.
In the same vein, you cannot build a solid line of units facing up or down, unless that line is running diagonally across the map. If you build a straight line facing north or south in the current version of the game, your units have open flanks that can be flank-attacked by the enemy (that is: by game design - you cannot prevent it).
Letting units face a hex side and making their frontage 3 hexes instead of 2 would solve all of these issues. Indeed it would improve my fun a lot. Right now, I spend a considerable amount of play time on checking my units' tiny facing, often resignating that I can't prevent very weird flank charges. It's no fun. And I can't see any grave new issues that would spring up with a more generous front angle (also, it's already working in the ACW series). A few thoughts:
- By increasing the frontage from 2 to 3 hexes, there will be more threat overall. This is something to consider. But the the threat mechanic is under scrutiny anyway.
- By opening up the front angle, long range weapons (artillery) will have an easier time concentrating their fire on a single point. This becomes particularly dangerous at medium distances, where the effect of the fire increases. So it might indeed require some reduction of artillery fire power (or a malus for oblique fire, i.e. when shooting at a target at the very borders of the fire angle, if that is possible). The same is true of shorter ranged weapons (muskets and rifles), of course. But their fire effect is not that big at ranges greater than 1 anyway.
- It will be harder to flank units for the *1.4 melee bonus. I don't think that this is a problem. If a compensation is required, the column melee bonus could be increased.