just yesterday, my whole town was slaughtered by a horde of goblins with a troll by the name of mountain, and ten minutes ago, the same thing happened to my second town, my puny 4 ppl crew of 1 archer, 1 footman, 1 cleric and 1 knight stood no chance and only managed to take down a few goblins before they were killed, the rest of the village followed shortly after. my town was originally flourishing when a certain messenger told me about the threat, however, without a carpenter or a hearthling brave enough to bring the chimes near the great army, the warning was no help at all, what do I do?
What difficulty are you playing on?
All I can tell you right now is to get better equipment for your soldiers and level them up to six as soon as possible. These four should be more than enough to take on the goblin army.
The first goblins want stuff
Just give them what they want or only defend yourself from the attacks
Do not attack the camp, they will leave on their own after some time
this can be repeated several times
There is a way you can get through the conflict with Ogo and Mountain that doesn’t involve fighting their army – the mysterious stranger who contacts you after defeating the goblin chieftain can help you with that. I usually go with this option because I can’t be bothered to deal with the long fight against Ogo’s army (it often lasts long enough that my food supplies start running low, which in turn messes with Daily Updates for the next few days while I get enough food back); but you do have to do a little work to make it happen still.
If you do decide to fight everyone though, the key is to not fight everyone at once – the wolves, different kinds of goblins, and Mountain all have different movement speeds so they’ll naturally spread out a bit. You can take things even further: build some basic defences (even just simple one-block-wide, 5-blocks-long “barriers” spread out to force incoming hordes to go around them), then you can place traps between those and have your soldiers attack from the sides to pick off isolated enemies.
Another way to even further split the enemies up is to make some of them flee, by targeting them with your footman/archer – fleeing enemies aren’t fighting back, so you can leave them to flee and focus on another enemy until they too break and run. Even when those enemies get their courage back, you can have your archer target them as they try to return to the fight – their courage will be low, so after a couple of hits they’ll flee again; and there’s a good chance that your archer will take them out
Another good tactic is the “hammer and anvil” approach – put your knight and cleric into one party, with the footman in another, and the archer in a third. Then, you can send the knight + cleric party as the “front line”/defenders (the “anvil”), since the knight is built to tank… send in the footman as a “hammer” to smash whatever enemy is engaged with the anvil at the time, since that enemy will be busy attacking your knight so the footman (who has less armour) doesn’t have to worry about getting hurt. The archer can then pick off wounded enemies that try to flee, or go after key enemy units (e.g. enemy archers) that might mess up your plans. You can even combine the hammer-and-anvil with your whole town as the “hammer” – set up your cleric + knight with a guard banner a little bit ahead of your town banner, and let your knight draw the aggro from the incoming enemies… then move back towards the town banner so that your whole town can charge in at once and catch the attackers by surprise!
Also note that Mountain is a knight class, and has a taunt attack; so if your party gets into a fight with him when there are other enemies around to support Mountain things can go really badly – everyone trying to fight Mountain (who has health to stick it out for a long time!) while wolves wear them down.
I personally like to have more archers than other soldiers (which is easier as NA!); so my “hammer” party is never intended to really have a big impact they’re more just a way to train those footmen quickly to become extra knights for the anvil – and I’ll often change them to knights as soon as they hit that third level, even if it’s in the middle of a fight (I sometimes have to disable the footmen’s jobs to get them to stop fighting and go pick up a knight’s shield hahaha.) Having multiple archers makes it really easy to pick off specific targets while the knights hold the line; doubly so once you start using spiky quivers and fire quivers for their slowing and DoT effects… I usually send the archers around the flanks to pick out the high-priority enemies from behind, and then harass the other enemies with slowing attacks (I’ll manually change targets to slow down as many enemies as possible) just to give the anvil party a chance to deal with some enemies before the rest of them show up. I use the “hammer” of footmen to intercept any enemies that come after my archers, or to charge in and finish off a low-health enemy if it will let my knights get a few seconds to change formation before new enemies arrive.
A final note: potions! Never underestimate the effect of buffing your entire town with courage and strength potions; if you set up the formation I suggested above where the knight and cleric stand in front to tank the initial attack wave then the whole town will be able to get a few hits in before enemies even have a chance to choose new targets… and as long as the civilians aren’t getting hit, they’ll keep fighting back even against the scariest enemies like kobold wolves or ogres. It’s only when the hearthlings take hits that they start getting afraid and fleeing.