Thanks everyone for the feedback, and please keep it coming. 
From your comments, I think there’s at least three categories of things we need to do to make the combat scenarios more enjoyable:
a.) Refine, and then explain, the combat mechanics. How does the party system work? What does the red banner do? What does the blue banner do? What are the default behaviors of footmen? Why do footmen attack sometimes and not attack other times? If you want your footmen to retreat, how do you do it? Ideally, there would be an in-game tutorial of some sort addressing these points, but we haven’t made one because we expect the current system to change a lot as we add more to combat. (If you happen to know the answers and want to post a discourse tutorial, I suppose this is your opportunity!)
b.) Fix a bunch of bugs. The location of the goblin camp, the fact that goblins get stuck on roofs, the fact that your footmen sometimes don’t attack the cage, the fact that the wolf camps spawn infinitely, these are all bugs, and will get fixed over time.
c.) Balance, reward, and tune. This is the tricky one–how hard should each monster be, what is the progression of monsters, and how to clearly telegraph your options regarding fighting, not fighting, and defeating them. What rewards should each segment of the campaign give? What is an acceptable loss when nobody has prepared? How many footmen do you think you need at each moment in the game in order to defeat the challenge as presented?
If you have any thoughts as to the above three points, or if you just have more info about how you fight the goblins, please keep sharing. Some other points, in response to those above:
Stonehearth aspires to be both a sandbox and an RPG. What that means for now is that there will be elements that are systems, and elements that are storied, with scaled ramp-up progression. That’s why the goblins do the same thing every time right now; we’re trying to make a goblin campaign that’s challenging and fun to play. Then, once we have one of those, we’ll write another and another and another, until we have enough scaled content so that we can randomly pick and choose among them. Until we get enough content, the content will be the same each time.
We don’t want to add too much random to the game as we’re tuning it, because otherwise, it’s hard to tell whether you’ve gotten a lucky roll, or if you’ve actually tuned it right.
We’ve been thinking about cutscenes, but at the moment, we don’t have the tech yet to take in-game screens of your townsfolk to put in the cutscenes. So… maybe later, when we’ve built that!
Noted!
That’s a bug. Can you describe more? Maybe in a separate bug thread?
Net worth is calculated by buildings, stockpiles, farms, etc. Armor on footmen should count too, but that isn’t implemented yet. Thanks for calling it out!
There are 3 separate wolf camps at the moment
This has to do with the courage vs menace stats, mentioned here