I think this will be my combo:

40% skirmishers
20% Nassau halberdiers (in early ages just pikeman, but later on I'll replace them for halberdiers and send my pikeman into death or to go a bit raiding)
5% Grenadiers
20% Ruyters
15% Hussars

This is what my tactics will be a bit like:

Raiding: Using my Ruyters to attack villies and lonely soldiers of the enemy, when the enemy comes to attack my Ruyters with cannons or with hand combat then I'll send out my Hussars to do the hand combat while the Ruyters shoot. Shore raiding tactic: spawn a lot of Ruyters out of my Fluyts and unload hussars to take out the cannons protecting the coast so they can't destroy my Ruyters or ships.

Massive battlefield tactic: I put my cannons in the back behind my lines of skirmishers and in front I put my fully upgraded halberdiers to protect my skirmishers. I'll also put a few pikeman in box formation around the cannons and on the flanks to protect my army against cavalry attacks. I will have my cavalry splitt up in 2 groups consisting of Ruyters and Hussars at the flanks. I will put my Grenadiers between my cannons and batallions of skirmishers and I will put my Samurai as reserves in the back of my army.

image of my formation for the Dutch so it will be a bit more easy to understand the following

1 - I will first let my skirmishers shoot on the enemy to force them to come to me and get in battle (because skirmishers have a very long range so they have to come closer)

2 - I will attack the flanks of the enemy with my cavalry by using hit and run attacks and back my Ruyters up with Hussars if they get to close. But they'll probably won't get too close because if so their will break up into parts and will be an easy prey for my infantry. After that I'll try to attack them from the back and defeat my enemy's cannons from the back with my hussars backed up with my Ruyters. The Ruyters will kill the enemies guarding the cannons from distance by shooting, while my hussars will also attack them in close battle and when they break through the Hussars will go finishing the cannons while my Ruyters will continue with killing enemy infantry that tries to save the cannons. After they did that job I'll pull them back a bit and go on with them with attacking my enemies back and flanks with hit and run attacks to try to break it's formations.

3 - When my enemy's formations fall apart or gets desperate or his formations get a bit messy I will use my Grenadiers to cause big trouble into the enemy's ranks. I'll do that then because when you do it in the beginning when everything is still looking very formationed it would be easy for the enemy to kill my grenadiers because they have to come close, but in the heath of battle my enemy is to busy with everything else so that I can let my Grenadiers do their work without having much trouble.

4 - In addition I will also hire Samurai merc units. I will use them as reserve for when I get in trouble because those units seem to be very powerful. I'll use them to protect my city when I'm in big troubles, but I'll also use them on the battle field when I have to try to turn the tide in my favor. And I'll possibly also throw them into battle when the enemy's formations got messy to really destroy him with a great victory. So possibly fighting on the same moment as the Grenadiers.

- If my enemy attacks first with his cavalry on my flanks i'll let my pikeman from my flanks go through my cavalry and attack them supported by Ruyters. When it's getting to busy for me with enemy cavalry in front of my army I'll also put my ruyters over there to kill that cavalry fast.

- o yes, and during all of that I'll ofcourse also blow my enemy's infantry away with my cannons.

Sounds interesting and well thought , I can't wait to see that.
I think though that massing a huge army of Veteran Skirmishers will prove very very effective ~ considering most of the enemy army will be more than 60% ranged infantry of musketeers.

Might not even need pikemen , because Ruyters would quickly take care of cavalry anyway. I would rather have anti-cannon artillery than anti-infantry cannons because they could sneak a cannon up to you eventually and kill the troops with low HP such as Skirmishers easy.

25%-Front line * Ruyters , range 12? , anti-cav
25%-Second line * Skirmishers , range 20 , anti-ranged infantry
25%-third line * More Skirmishers
-In between Anti-Cannon artillery,& other cannons +medics.
25%-Fith ( last line ) * Pikmen , anti-cav

So , putting the Ruyters up front is better , they protect against cav. and also have the same range as enemy musketeers ( because if you put Ruyters with range 12 ? behind another unit , then they cant reach the enemy musketeers )
The skirmishers have excellant range of 20 , picking off ranged infantry even before they start attacking the Ruyters. So now both your Ruyters & your skirmishers can have ~ concentrated fire power on the enemy.

The anti-cannon artillery protected in the middle takes out those enoying cannons while they are still moving before they get a chance to fire on your nice formation.
Plus medics could heal as well protected in between.
At the back are pikemen to stop the enemy from taking you from behind in a flank ( also they could be sent to the front lines quickly in an emergency.)

I wouldn't bother with anymore than 4 or 5 unit types , because after that in the heat of battle having more choices sometimes leads to too many mistakes. I think all those unit types counter everything effectively anyway. ( and at a good economical price too , which is important )

Remaining Ruyter info:

Quote:

so possibly the other stats will be the same as the stats from the Dragoon, which isn't bad at all if you keep in mind that he costs less and takes the half pop cap!

Btw, why aren't we able on this forum to have avatars?

Btw, more about the Dutch historical background. As you might possibly know our "symbol/emblem" is the Lion. That isn't very exceptional because in the past a lot of knights had a lion as weapon and even today also the English and the Flemish have the Lion as their emblem and maybe also some other nations. But the English have 3 "lying" yellow lions above eachother on a red background with their faces turned to the spector. The Flemish lion looks a lot like the Dutch lion but it is a black more "rough pointy/hooky" lion on a yellow background. We have of course an Orange/Gold Lion (Because of our Royal family "Oranje Nassau" Orange is the color for Oranje and Blue is the color for Nassau) in "climbing" position and he, what you don't see often, is holding a sword and arrows and has a crown. The Background of it is Blue with Orange/Gold squares and mostly you see the weapon surrounded by two lions. That's why you today with football not only see with us the color orange a lot but also the orange lion, an orange lion's head with a crown for example is the symbol of our "Royal Dutch Football Foundation" (KNVB: Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbal Bond).

Here I'll show you the differences:
The English Royal Lions
The Flemish Lion

And here the Dutch Lion in the Royal Weapon of Orange Nassau:
Dutch weapon of the Royal House of Orange Nassau
Modernized Dutch weapon as symbol of some kind of sports club
As you can see the Dutch "sentence" is "Je Maintiendrai", which we got when the French had our country during Napoleon.

The Dutch lion without everything around it:
http://www.wazamar.org/images/wpn-ned.jpg

http://www.noordwijkerhout.nl/webimages/Rim00006schild Oranje.jpg

Btw, when I was searching I found a beautiful other image of the Dutch Blue Hussars during the burrying of "Juliana" (the Queen before Beatrix):
http://www.kennisnet.nl/special/juliana/images/DSC_6621_JJ.jpg
source:
http://www.kennisnet.nl/special/juliana/

Btw, the "Lion" as symbol was already populair in Holland before the Royal House of Orange Nassau came here, because the count of Holland like "Floris V" also had the Lion as his symbol, but this was a "climbing" red lion without a sword, arrows and crown and he is on a yellow background:
http://www.engelfriet.net/Alie/Hans/wapengraven.gif
Today it still is the flag of "South-Holland", the province where I live:
South-Hollandic Flag

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 08-22-2005 @ 02:25 PM).]

Everytime I feel like promoting my country in some way, I just remember gorbag orc is already there to do it for me...

haha :P, I just like it to look things up and compare them so people know the difference better, because the Dutch aren't very well known.

Btw, I nowhere said "Dutch is better than..." or something like that, because that isn't true at all, I'm just giving info, like my post above you.

Edit:
Okay, I'll keep that in mind to use more alineas and commas. That's mostly my problem when I'm writing, I get sometimes a bit too detailed because of why it gets to lengthy and then I forget to make the sentences more clear and easy to read.

And I just found this map which is quite beautiful and funny. You see the Netherlands and Belgium in that lion, that's why it's called "leo belgicus". Because as I already told you both the symbol of Flanders and the Netherlands is the lion:
http://www.themaphouse.com/specialistcat/leo/belux665.jpg

http://dutchrevolt.leidenuniv.nl/Nederlands/images/atlas93.jpg

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 08-22-2005 @ 03:00 PM).]

Yeah, I know, that's what I meant, and you're doing a great job at it. I'm glad other people are interested in history here.

PS one remark though: you might want to use more empty lines and perhaps commas to make your (often long) posts easier to read.

Gorbad orc's history lessons are really well done. I like learning about those things.
Maybe thats one strong reason why I like AoE games so much ( although I'm not so fond of AoM , a little bit too much fantasy for me.)

Its good to look at in the past what humans have done , and what were their thoughts etc. , knowing the past history is a positive thing , without it we wouldn't be really human than would we ?

Anyway I've met a few Dutch people while on travel , they seem much more kind and easy going ( and very honest and open minded ) than other European people such as German , French or Italian etc.
Maybe its because of their easy going attitude they were the only country that was allowed to trade with Japan.
Also they've been everywhere around the world and encountered many different people
(despite making lots of slaves and taking control of other counties like in South Asia , but we ..... the Japanese did the same thing too , did you know many Japanese today were originaly from Korea only a hundred years ago , taken as slaves , now about 30% of our ancestory is Korean , I bet you didn't know that ?.... its kind of a big secret people dont like to talk about too often)~

By the way have you ever heard of the phrase
' Dutch courage' ?.

hmm, well, I know that a lot of English expressions with "Dutch" in it aren't positive at all like "being as drunk(sp?) as a Dutchman". That comes from the time that we and the English had a lot of sea wars with us.

I knew that the Japanese had a lot of wars with korea and invaded it quite a few times (but mostly not with a lot of succes because China sometimes supported Korea or was also trying to conquer Korea), but I never knew that a lot of slaves were taken from Korea.

Yes it's true that the Dutch did terrible things with slave trading with their WIC (West Indische Compagnie: West-Indian Company) just like a lot of other countries did at that time. Now in the Netherlands there still live a lot of Indonesian people over here or with an Indonesian background. But they've integrated very well.

Now some people are complaining about all the immigrants like the Maroccans (sp?) and people from the Balkan etc coming over here, while saying that never so many people immigrated over here. But that's not true at all, the Netherlands have always been an country with a lot of immigrants. Those immigrants in the 17th century for example made Amsterdam very wealthy because it were mostly high educated people who fled to Amsterdam for their government like a lot of Belgs from Antwerpen and a lot of Jews (who mostly were jewelers). Also a lot of Germans fled to the Netherlands and a lot of other people like some English and Danish people. We were very attractive as an immigration country, because we were one of the first countries (if not the first) with freedom of religion (which was one of the big items in the 80 years war with Spain) and because we here had a lot of wealth because of trading. (ofcourse not everybody was rich, you ofcourse still had a lot of poor people, only the rich people and some middle class people became much richer at that time). Also because in that time it was relativly quiet without war here. But there's one point which those some people are true about, those immigrants in the past were mostly highly educated people, while most immigrants now are of a low educated class. Although this is not true for all people, because a lot of people from the Balkan and Iraq and Iran are quite high educated.

About that you think that the Dutch are kind. Some other europeans think that we are quite "rough" and not well manered. That is because we are quite openminded and say almost everything we think, there aren't much taboos anymore for us. Sometimes being very open or say almost everything you think can be quite shocking for other cultures like the Spanish for example who have a much more passive way of handling than we with our more active very direct way of handling. But those other cultures also aren't bad at all, because being very direct can also sometimes give problems, and mostly because the Spanish are very passive they are very friendly. I for example like the French a lot (i've had 2 exchanges with school with them and go on holiday over there a lot) because they are a bit like the Dutch but much more relaxed. The Dutch mostly hurry much too much because of busy work and so on. Also they aren't as different as most people think when you go talking with them, it are very nice friendly people and if you are kind to them and try to speak their language, even though if you only speak a few words, they're also very kind to you. I think that the bad reputation of the French is mostly not true, of course you sometimes have less good people, but those people are in every culture, most people are very friendly and the French are mostly very helpful.

btw, horrible news!

Quote:

I hope very very much the Dutch will get Samurai, but I don't think so sadly enough :S . Please ES! Give the Dutch Samurai, that would be much historically better than the Portuguese who couldn't even trade with the Japanese and only in the beginning gave them a few guns and had a few conflicts with them!

Btw, will the Dutch also have the most famous gohstship ever, the flying Dutchman? A black ship with red sails sailing even against the wind direction and going through other ships.

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 08-23-2005 @ 06:47 AM).]

Haha, for the Flying Dutchman, look no farther than the original Age of Empires.

New Dutch info from Sandyman about Fluyts and Halberdiers:

Quote:

Quote:

Well it is a shame Dutch dont get the Samurai merc ,

ES ..... if any civ. deserves the Samurai merc its historicaly the Dutch , why the Portugese ?? we the Japanese got rid of those guys , constantly trying to convert us.

As for Dutch people today , yes I know some people think they're rough and that is just because they're open minded and say what they think. Most of the time that might offend even Japanese people sometimes bacause Japanese always hide their thoughts & opinions -
thats why people make a mistake to think Japanese are the most polite people , but its not true ! , actually in their minds Japanese are hiding really nasty things they think.

I'm quite strange for Japanese though , dont take my personality as a good example or normal Japanese. I've spent so much time overseas from an early age so its made me unique from others in my country.

I love Dutch honesty , it's so funny sometimes to hear what they really think , even if its shocking or seems rude I don't mind and get used to it(even their open minded view of sex , which is taboo in Japan). It just seems that Maybe Dutch dont feel its needed to hide the fact we are human beings , we're not all perfect angels after all.

International view of each country's people , from opinions of other countries people while travelling around-
Dutch = No taboo
French = Arrogant
English = Snobby
US = Selfish
German = Strict
Australian = Lazy

Japanese = ( people make mistake of thinking quiet and polite , the negative things people say , terrible English .....which I must admit is true)

(These of course dont reflect my opinions , just for example what the French think of English , etc. )

But there are a lot of rude sayings in English about other countries , yes I checked ' Drunk as a Dutch man !' .
The English also say 'Arrogant blo*** French man' and have lots of jokes about 'as du** as an Irish man'.

I like Dutch people more than alot of other countries people , and yes I heard you've been getting alot of immigrants again recently. I think the uneducated ones do not belong in Holland though , the middle eastern people are great , they're really intelligent. People should stop thinking of them as crazy terrorists ( Japanese are now very fieghtened of middle eastern people because of the US ridiculous war on terror )

By the way .... your flying Dutchman was in AoE1 , check the senario/map edit.

Yes I know, but the Flying Dutchman wasn't very cool in AoE. I hope he will be some kind of hero unit on AoE3.

btw, see this article, lots of stats info about the Dutch!

http://fph.fropco.com/forums/index.php?s=875e3828fa664334dbe32945e635691a&act=ST&f=2&t=5535

East Friesian: let me give you an advise: Don't use Pikeman but Halberdiers, as you can see the Nassau Halberdiers even get faster (5,5) than Pikeman because of their special upgrades! Also their attack is much bigger than that of Pikeman and even of Swiss pikeman!

btw, nice images and info about Dutch fortified cities, pikeman and musketeers:
http://www.knife-depot.com/images/product/4_18877.jpg

Nice Dutch musketeer paintings:
http://www.villageantiques.ch/prints/DeGeyn/deGeyn1.htm
http://www.villageantiques.ch/prints/DeGeyn/deGeyn4det.jpg
http://www.villageantiques.ch/prints/DeGeyn/deGeyn6.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/nl/thumb/b/b6/Cirkeltegels.jpg/602px-Cirkeltegels.jpg
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-46/pics/nightwatch.jpg

I also found this beautiful website with a lot of images of napeolonic dutch soldiers and other dutch soldiers! (and some other nations soldiers like the English an French and a nice video!)
http://home.skyaccess.nl/1weeg667/Fotos.htm

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 08-24-2005 @ 05:28 AM).]

x100 thanks again for the pictures and also the info ! ,
please keep me up to date with any other stats or paly experience etc.

Right now I'm making a collection of all the stats I've printed out over the last few months ; now I'm studying them to get familiar with things.
I wish though we knew the speed of attack though.

But check out the range of the Howitzer! (sp?) its got a 40 ! .

[This message has been edited by East_Friesian (edited 08-24-2005 @ 10:18 AM).]

The Dutch respected Japanese? Not really, they may traded with them but the Dutch always thought they where superior than any other race. And quiet frankly if you compare a average dutchmen with a japanense in those times, than ofcourse people would say the dutch where superior, they where much larger and more muscular.

But still everyone wants Samurais in the game?

Quote ;

Heinrich
Colonist
Location: Amsterdam posted 08-25-05 04:30 AM EDT (US) 189 / 190
------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------
The Dutch respected Japanese? Not really, they may traded with them but the Dutch always thought they where superior than any other race. And quiet frankly if you compare a average dutchmen with a japanense in those times, than ofcourse people would say the dutch where superior, they where much larger and more muscular.

------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------

That's really funny you say that , of course the Dutch might say something negative about Japanese looking different. But we did the same thing back then ~ look at those funny people with the really big noses , they're very hairy but smelly too.
Did you ever know what the Chinese thought about Marco Polo? , they viewed him at first as just a hairy white barbarian.
Even Japanese make fun of Korean and Chinese appearence , did you know that ? I bet you can't even tell the difference between us.

Japanese & Dutch might have more similar belief's than you would think , Japanese thought as well that they were the most superior race on Earth~ why also did you think we closed our country for hundreads of years to outsiders ? not just to stop religion but also to stop genetic contamination.
Unfortunately the Japanese were the Nazi's of the middle east.

I've found a nice image showing "Staten-Generaal in 1651", the old official government building on the ancient "binnenhof" in "Den Haag" (De Hage, like English say it). As you can see they have a lot of Spanish flags hanging in it as victory trophies of sea and land battles against the Spanish:
http://www.anno.nl/sites/anno/contents/i000937/delen-445.jpg

Also a nice article which explains it very clear about the Dutch flag and the royal symble:
http://www.minbuza.nl/default.asp?CMS_ITEM=MBZ460652

Also something else: New Orleans/USA, Ask the Dutch government for help! We are dike-experts and we know how to deal with water and we are especially experienced with water dissasters. We had a big flood dissaster in 1953 in which 10% of the population got drowned in the flooded area's! After this we began with an emergency programm and improving our dikes with the best technologies. We also were able to close the wholes in the dikes with a lot of stones and containers to stop the water and pomp it back. And in the "new waterway" (the river of the 2nd biggest harbour in the world of Rotterdam, 1rst is Shangai since this year, Rotterdam was the biggest for 30 years) we have a very modern storm flood system which we can close in case of big storms, it contains even three times as much steal as the eiffel tower! It can be closed and opened, because the river is very important for Rotterdam with trading and transporting. This is it, it is very close to where I live, I visited it and it's only an hour on bicycle:
http://www.watermarkt.nl/TIW/webs/TIW006/TIW0061601.gif
See this about the storm flood dissaster:
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/voeveren/
this is a bit older more famous dike which was build after the dissaster:
http://www.delta2003.nl/uploaded_files/59_stormvloedkering1.jpg

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 08-31-2005 @ 02:00 PM).]

For those interested in Dutch history, I've just posted a detailed article in the history forum. Sooner or later it'll be uploaded AoE3H's history section, too.

Until then, read it HERE.

You really should tell more about the VOC and WIC and there expansion.
Also more about the Dutch-Anglo wars and it's many seabattles. Further more i would like too add that the Dutch admirals where far superior to any others. Especially Michel de Ruyter and Maarten Tromp they are possibly the greatest admirals ever sailed the sea.

The scope of the article isn't to examine individual wars, battles and commanders - in that case it would've far outstretched its current 6 pages. It is intended to give an overview of Dutch history, and it does mention De Ruyter, especially.
Personally, I don't think there's a "greatest" of anything. Whether De Ruyter and Tromp were better than Nelson and Cochrane, for example, is a matter of personal preference, not scientific or historical fact.

Very good wonderful easy to read article! Not too short, not too long. I can understand it that you can't go into details too much, like that William 2 fought at Waterloo and that today there is a statue of the Dutch Lion over there to commenmorate that (He got wounded in the battle, some say he was very well fighting and risked his life for his man, other say he was reckless and very stupid acting on the battlefield) or that they also used flood techniques during the Eighty Years War, because otherwise you would easily get dozens or even hundreds of pages. Even about only small parts of what you have described are books written of more than 100 pages.

I think that the Ruyter was a very good admiral with a very good tactical and strategic view for that time, but I don't think you can say he was "better" or something like that, btw, Nelson lived in another time so you can't compare them very well and Nelson did other very important things.

Wonderful article, I'm looking forward to see it on the AoE3page! Btw, please also update the civ info of the Dutch, for example changing 18th into 17th century and add some other things we know now.

Today I read an article about AoE3 in the Dutch magazine "Kijk". It was very positive about it, but it was dissapointed about the Dutch when they saw them when Shelley was in Amsterdam, because the Dutch HC had hills, while there are no hills here at all (which also the designer himself noticed) and that they used the wrong flag, because it's just from the top to the bottom: red-white-blue, and not like now red-white-blue-red-white-blue. This flag even never was an early official Dutch flag, the Dutch flag has always almost exactly been the same as it is today! (the only change that was made already very very early is changing orange into red) So not historically accurate at all! The Dutch didn't had another flag like the Union Jack without vertical red stripes or the french fleur-de-lys flag! But I can live with that, I think that this Dutch "double" flag is quite special and beautiful, and there were used some unofficial variations of the official Dutch flag, like the "double" or even triple or kwartet flag with 4 dutch flags below eachother on one flag! And also sometimes you had: red-white-blue large white part with VOC on it (East India Trading Company) and at the bottom red-white-blue again. They also need to be careful with the colour of the blue in the flag! make it lighter than the French and British blue, because those use a very dark blue colour, but don't use light blue, because otherwise it will become the flag of luxembourg!

Luxembourg flag:
http://www.cvsflags.com/images/foreign/Large/luxembourg.gif
Dutch Flag:
http://cms.dordrecht.nl/Dordrecht/gx/ZyybhyuGgF.jpeg

Another thing I'm worried about is this. The statistics never ly:
http://www.agecommunity.com/player_stats.aspx
See the Dutch:
played: 5
won: 0
!!!!!

The only civ beside the portuguese (but only played one time!) with which has never been won! So they are much too weak! Give their Ruyters more attack power or their halberdiers or make an extra royal guard upgrade for them (they only have one royal guard upgrade while almost all civs have 2 royal guard upgrades!) like "Limburgse Jagers" as royal guard skirmishers for the Dutch (those Limburgse Jagers eventually were quite famous!)! Or make their banks cheaper.

[This message has been edited by gorbag orc (edited 10-01-2005 @ 04:29 PM).]

gorbarc please go whining somewhere else, they reset the stats, first the dutch had a winning percentage of 40%.

But serious, sto pwhining about civs being under/overpowered till you have the game. and do you really care about a flag?

See my post! I was just editing it when you posted your reply, as you can see I don't care too much about the flag, I care the most about those hills, hopefully they have been removed!

half your post is about flags, and can you post link to screenie of dutch HC?

and i know i was a little bit aggresive in my previous post, but just wait till we have full version vbefore starting about under and overpowered

[This message has been edited by schildpad (edited 10-01-2005 @ 04:33 PM).]