Yes - Saalfeld - a painful topic for me as I failed to win despite being French.
In mitigation, all that I would say is that I did change the orbat in favour of the Prussians - all Saxon btns were made 30 strong, and 1st btns of each Saxon regiment were made 1st Line and the Prussian player was given 4 individual artillery pieces under the guise of btn guns but then treated as ordinary artillery for firing purposes. To make matters worse, we also forgot that cannister for 4pdrs is a +3 and not +4 ! I also gave the Prussian player an additional (small) brigade - reinforcements from Blankenberg - but, to be fair to Maturin, I gave up before these arrived.
The French orbat was unchanged except that I had staggered arrival - a brigade every two turns, starting with the 17th Light and ending with the divisional artillery. This meant that the French player had no artillery for most of the game - My research, however, suggests that this is historical (except for 5 x 4pdr cannon that arrived earlier but which I foolishly chose not to represent).
What happened I hear you ask? I rather stupidly decided to engage in a high risk cavalry battle on my right flank in which I lost almost all of my cavalry (bad throws of the dice) at little cost to his. This meant that my right flank was pinned by his cavalry and progress in the middle became painfully slow, exacerbated by being outgunned by his artillery.
Must have another go with a slightly modified orbat and with proper treatment of btn guns.
Most of the issues that arose have been well answered by Rudorff. The way in which the skirmisher question was put, however, does not deal with the issues that arose. In fact, there are three of questions that arose from skirmishers:-
1. Player A is on assualt orders and is moving forward. Player B is on hold orders. Player B's skirmishers happen to be deplyed to the right of his line, taking pot shots at one of Player A's columns and are not covering Player B's line immediately to the front. Player A wins the initiative and moves two btns in line approx 10 cms way from two btns in line belonging to Player B. Player A also puts his 18 skirmishers halfway between his line and player B's line. Is it open to Player B, in his movement phase, to insert his skrimishers between his line and Player A's skirmishers bearing in mind that they will be too close to his own line to be an effective skirmish screen?
2. If the answer to question 1 is yes, are Player B's skirmishers an effective screen vis-a-vis Player A's skirmishers such that Player A's skirmishers must fire at Player B's skirmishers?
3. Even if the answer to 2 is 'yes', in our case, we had 18 Player A skirmishers facing off against 8 Player B skirmishers. Are all of player A's skirmishers required to fire at Player B's skirmishers or would fiire be divided so that, say, 12 Player A skirmishers fire on the Player B skrimishers whilst the other 6 fire at the line behind.
The last point can be significant because a single casualty can now not only do away wih the no casualty morale bonus but also convert a large line to a medium line and a medium line to a small line etc and thsi can have significant consequences.
Rgds
O
PS Don't know if Maturin took more photos of Saalfeld - I didn't (too pissed off to reach for my camera). I do know, however, that he took loads of of photos of a recent refight of Hagleberg and I would uge you to badger him to post thse up.