I would love there to be more to a peaceful encounter, maybe earn recipes or some other rewards from taking a peaceful route than being aggressive.I mean they’re just goblins, what could they possibly do? 
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On the save I’ve been using I recently exterminated the goblins with two footman in iron armor with steel short swords, I feel like this is and isn’t a fairly balanced point. I believe at this point my footman are sufficiently equipped to deny the goblins and even slap them back a little, the problem being, you can’t just slap there camp. As far as I know there is no way of pulling your footman back out of a fight, they just go till they die.
If fight difficulties are going to get higher I think such a feature needs to be added so that you can fight back against the goblins slowly instead of either defending, or wiping them out.
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I usually either accept their tribute once to delay attacks and kill with them once the they come to collect the goods.
I find combat to be simplistic, the only working approach I’ve found is to turn a 5-6 heathlings into footmen to ensure positive numbers of footmen (workers can almost be ignored for combat purposes). With this squad I usually kill the camp directly after dispatching the early “collect stuff squad”. I occasionally also do this directly when they spawn.
In alpha 10 I’ve been unable to command footmen (they patrol regardless of party orders or defence modes) so I’ve usually stopped my playthroughs in annoyance when I could not attack the goblins. Therefore I’ve not encountered any wolfs.
I think peaceful options are uninteresting at the moment, beyond getting a bit more time to prepare. Until I interact with some faction that’s more player like, ie can provide both benefits and drawbacks to me in their interactions I’m only interested in cleaning out the threat. So for example, if I could get the goblins to guard against undead, or similar other useful purpose I’d be more interested in paying them of and keeping them around. It’s also hard to keep specific resources around for a tribute (ie. what if my heathlings eat that jerky which was requested)
Also I never have any full-time footmen, (footmen) levels appear to do very little for combat ability. Numbers and gear are more important which can be easily adjusted by promoting people just before the fights starts.
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Is my assumption that the net worth of a town is calculated only with items in stockpiles correct? If so, I think this has made the game a bit too easy. I made a good deal of bronze and steel armor and weapons, but had these valuable items worn by my footmen. Thus, my calculated net worth was probably lower than it should have been. This made it easy to gear up tremendously before the goblins showed up, and easier still to wipe them out without any meaningful resistance.
In all honesty, I had no idea there was a peaceful alternative. Like martyrsvale said, I attacked the camp right off and freed the wolves, but there was still a wolf attack later. My soldiers didn’t want to engage, however, but if I told t hem to go into defense mode, they did their job.
So I continued my game today and saw the wolf camp for the first time. I sent my footman over and destroyed it pretty easily, one of the wolves did attack my footman after they were released but then it ran off to freedom. The second wolf camp however I had some problems with, it spawned without a fence around the wolves and the immediately ran down to my village (Why can wolves climb ladders?) and started eating all my rocks. At this point my footman finally get back to town (I had sent them a ways off to take care of some zombies for xp) and cower from the wolves, I turned on town defense and one of my footman and the mason attacked the wolves while everyone else cowered (guess he wasn’t to happy about the wolves eating his livelihood).
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because they aren’t actually normal wolves, they’re werewolves…
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those are some hardy wolves 
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I have had nothing but problems with goblin camps across almost a dozen games. Not one encounter that hasn’t been marred by bugs or flawed design.
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Numerous times new villagers (at the 1600 value mark) have spawned near the newly spawned (1500 value) goblin camp. Even though the new villagers don’t “see” the goblins, the camp sends 3-4 camp guards all the way to the village, killing everyone.
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Once the new (1500 value) goblin camp spawned within sight of the only building my village had, killing everyone within minutes. There was miles of open territory for the camp to spawn.
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Every other time the camp has spawned appropriately but when I declare war (by refusing to give tribute) the camp glitches out and all the “invader sighted!” spawns are frozen in the camp, piling up until there’s dozens of them and I finally suit up to kill them all. This isn’t though since they’re frozen and don’t move.
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Mixed in with 3 are a variety of other small annoying issues ranging from armor suits having invisible wearers, goblins requesting absurd tribute like large sums of iron, etc.
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I hate wolves. Is there no way to end their attacks? I’ve been destroying camp after camp after camp, but they just keep spawning new ones. If I miss a single one before they go on a raid, I have to reload from an old save because there is no way to fight them once they go on a raid and it’s game over.
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@mrxak, there’s only supposed to be three. That there are more than three… is a bug. Thanks for letting me know!
The first camp spawned up on the mountain nearby, could that be it?
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
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At the time of the wolf attack, I don’t recall there being any “active” camps. The one I’d attacked and freed the wolves at, they just sat there being adorable, but about one or two nights later, I got the tired guy running in and then wolves. I’ll keep an eye out on future playthroughs to make sure that there are camps to pair with the attacks.
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Wait, are the camps supposed to be showing up one at a time, or three at once? In my game I got 5 camps (and counting), but they arrived one at a time (and without any indication that a new one had spawned, I just happened to notice).
I think the wolves are awful for a variety of reasons, but I’m hoping that will get tweaked and the bugs will get fixed. My only complaint about the first phase of the goblin campaign is that the goblins never fight any of my footmen, they all either just run away from my footmen when they go on the attack, or they ignore my footmen while my footmen chase after them trying to kill them, while the goblin attackers run around destroying hundreds of items. The AI of the goblin raiders just seems insane to me. They should deal with the threat of my footmen first, and kill any hearthlings that get in their way, and then pillage. Right now they are just suicidally attacking my stored items. Equally bad from an AI standpoint, my footmen are like the scary wolves of the second part of the campaign. When my footmen go on the offensive, the goblins run away and put up no fight as my footmen destroy their camp.
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I’ve troubleshooted the issue enough that I could reproduce it and created [a bug report] 1 about it. It’s amazing how easy it is to think “everybody must see this” when I’m doing something quite specific to my play style that causes me to hit this issue every time.
On the other hand, since I figured out a workaround for the bug, I’ve also found the wolves… And the obvious solutions I see is free them (kill all goblins and destroy pens) and run (I guess by selecting a defensive position away from my village). I guess some other option, such as having your trapper tame them back, could exist, but it’s not clear from the messages. If such a “third way” exists then I suggest a popup suggesting the solution if you meed the conditions for it.
I’ve also found a bug with the wolves where the wolves fight (and kills) the footmen after they destroy the cage, but I have no clue how to reproduce it. Other than that the camp spawned very close to the town, close enough that normal footmen patrol routes found the camp. I can see if I manage to reproduce it tomorrow, and if so I’ll open a bug report thread about it.
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Ok, the build’s been updated with all the fixes we could reasonably make in four days. (More fixes coming, but they touch deeper structures than we safely could alter this week.) If you’re on Steam Latest, give it a spin and let us know how it goes!
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You guys and gals rock. 
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OK since you guys told me that your updated the campaign before the weekend I played tonight to test. A few notes:
- Much improved. I like the little camps that spawn before the chief
shows up. It will help new player ramp up instead of being run
over. - The chief’s camp works better than before, but it still ended
up with 6 goblins stuck by the campfire with the chief. Please fix
this before you go SEA. It’s so much more difficult (and so much
more rewarding) to wipe out when those gobbos don’t get stuck. - I freed 3 groups of wolves, then nothing. No completion message, no
more wolves. Something didn’t end right. - The game didn’t like me placing a flower garden in the yard of one of my hearthling’s homes.
- After almost a month in game, LUA suddenly jumped to 99.8% of
processing and everything came to a screeching halt. Looks like
this game is done with me. - The blacksmith experience needs a tweak. I have 3 units with steel shortswords, steel shields, iron mail and almost 40 steel bars and I’m still stuck at level 2. Maybe we can convince you to sneak that archer in so we can level the blacksmith by making ammunition and/or bows?
I have to say that this was a good set up updates. Keep going!
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Thanks for playtesting! We really appreciate it!
Can you describe how they got stuck? Like, were they just hanging out but moving/breathing etc, or were they on top of the fire/chest/house and unable to get off?