Well, the Thirty Year war didn't last thirty years straight. It was four different phases.
The Bohemian-Palatinate Phase (1618-1623) which ended with the Czechs crushed at White Mountain (1620) and the Palatinate occupied by Spanish forces, an obvious Habsburg victory.
The Danish Phase, which was more a Saxon-Danish war and also had a Polish-Swedish war (1624-1629) which ended even more reverses for Protestantism with all Bohemia, Pommerania and Mecklenburg occupied by the Habsburgs.
Ferdinand, in 1629, issued the Edict of Restitution which in turn triggered the Swedish Phase (1630-1635). Much of the Imperial successes were reversed due the genius of Maurice of Nassau's linear battle lines, which Gustavus Adlophus employed, against the square formations of the Imperialist armies. Victories at Breitenfield (1631) and Lutzen (1632) bled Imperialist armies but with the death of the Lion of the North at Lutzen, the Protestant armies were without great leadership and were defeated by the Imperialists at Nordlingen (1634).
Ferdinand repealed the Edict and signed the Treaty of Prague in 1635 which settled most of the religious issues but the war continued on as Habsburg successes against the Dutch and in Germany led France into the fray in the fourth phase, the Franco-Swedish phase (1635-1648). The war took on purely secular aims as Catholic France and Protestant Sweden and Holland warred with the Catholic Imperialists in an attempt to curb Habsburg power and add to their own. So, in the end, with Swedish armies at Prague and French power gaining everywhere and Habsburg power exhausted the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was signed.
Honestly though, the real losers were the people of the German principalities, where at least a third of its population lie dead (and areas like the Palatinate, Mecklenburg and Wurtemburg it was two thirds or more) and it's lands devastated by Imperial and Protestant excesses and left it a hopeless polyglot of minor states in a time when other Europeans nations were, for lack of a better term, becoming nations.
There. Now that we have the history down, no, I have never seen a Thirty Year War but then again it was sort of four wars anyways. It's sort of like saying the Hundred Years War was hundred years of constant fighting.
