I highly encourage you to actually check the ingame stats so you can see how much of an overstatement your “ratings” are.
Yes, they are not early game enemies. But still, if you pick your fights carefuly, you can tackle smaller groups relatively soon.
Their melee defense is certainly above average, but not by any huge margin. Nothing a simple spears cant fix and they are easy to come by.
If you use them and properly utilize the overwhelm mechanic, you should hit them quite often. And they are fragile, once you manage to land few hits, they go down fast. (Goblin skirmishers got only 45 hp and they are the toughest regular unit)
I actually laughed at the ranged defence entry. Why? because out-goblin the goblins is likely your best bet (provided you got at least chain mail on your frontliners). Hunting bows are superior to goblin ones, and standing behind shieldwall gives your archers edge over the goblin ones, if you manage to get some height advantage, even better. Couple of javelins on your tanks and perhaps crossbow or two in second line can pick off skirmishers quite nicely. Due to fragile nature of the goblins, any odd headshot you manage to score is almost guaranteed kill and regular hits do plenty of damage anyway.
From my observation, their melee attacks dont hit out of ordinary what would one expect, compared to other enemies. And once you got some basic mail, they dont even hit that hard, since except crossbows, all their weaponry is inferior to what you can get. (Though of course its nice if you can get your hands on them early, since they are better than basic gear). I might agree that goblin archers melee capabilities could be toned down slightly.
To their curved knives of death.. they are just your plain old sax knife. They of course have that dreaded attack that can pierce through armor. If you got any decent shields (better than bucklers) they are not that scary. It got penalty to hit and they can try it two, maybe three times before they get fatigued. Sure they can score lucky kill once in a while, but thats just the way of the game. And in whole goblin arsenal, there is not a single weapon that can bypass or destroy shields, so they have hard time dealing with those.
Think, adapt and pick your fights. As far as i know, goblins were specificaly made to “break the meta” and they are doing that just fine.
