Eighty Years' War

This war has several names: The Revolt, Dutch war of Independence and last but not least the Eighty Years' War. But enough about the names, what do you think of this war and its global effects?

Spains total utter downfall from great power status.

The Eighty Years war wasn't the cause of that. It was just a factor of it. The Thirty Years War, that was fought at the same time, was far worse for Spain. They had to fight so many wars and they couldn't pay it. And I believe, but I'm not sure, they also threw the moriscos out of the country at that time, which was also a stupid move.

Spain just had its hands in to many places at once, and thus they paid for it.

I think the great change that it brougth was that in Europe, the balance of power changed to Central Europe and Nothern Europe (with England, France, Netherlands), while Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain and the Papal States) lost their former supremacy.

Same here. The HRE, UK, France and the German states took the main stage after this point.

Not the HRE. I might be wrong about this but I believe the Emperor was basically powerless after the peace of Westphalia in 1648. He could only do something if all the member states agreed upon it. There were, depending on who's counting, 200 to 1000 members so that's never going to happen. It was just Austria that was very powerful. But it's possible I'm confused and this happened after the War of Spanish Succesion.

Well then I will revise the HRE to the Austrian Empire.

It still didn't give the dutch real independence, they just became British puppets at this point.

Not really, we had several wars with the Brits soon after we became independant and even took over their government.

Hey, you're still a fun nation to play as in Empire Total War!!!

I actually thought it was our entire navy, that he merged both navies. So British people, thank us for getting the best navy in the world.

If I remember correctly, after the Dutch became, well, independent, or some time at least after its independence, William, the stradtholder of the Netherlands at the time, became King of England, which made happy times between the countries, but that bond ended as soon as William died and the Hanoverian branch took over (Georges). Somewhere during this time their entire badass navy somehow became less badass.

Ya the Dutch kind of got fucked over. Oh well, you weren't going anywhere special anyway.

They could have gone on to be a massive maritime power, controlling colonies in both the Americas and India indefinitely. Instead, they became sidelined. By the end of the War of Spanish Succession, they were just simply there.