Fighting goblins is often very hard when all/most of your company is on tier-1 perks only. Once many/most of them are beyond that, it gets fairly easy to fight standard goblin parties, but ones with bastard shamans can still slaughter level-11 veterans if you aren’t adequately careful/lucky.
Things that make it easy/easier to fight goblins:
– Melee fighters with quick hands and lots of max fatigue, who can afford to form repeated shieldwalls with a kite while advancing, and who can instantly switch to a heater after closing on those net-bearing bastards who are backed up by jagged pikes (or who can form a shieldwall with a heater before closing on one of those bastards forming a spearwall)
– Crossbowmen with good armour, high initiative, the dodge perk and lots of extra crossbows in reserve, who can move forwards and shoot twice per turn at shamans, overseers, ambushers and bastard net-bearers (or bastard spearwall-formers), while remaining less likely to receive hits or serious damage when it’s not their turn
– Nimble swordmasters can be surprisingly effective against goblins, despite their vulnerability to arrows and nets, since they can (a) casually move through the melee without being hit, so that they can corner those unsuspecting ambusher bastards, and (b) use Riposte to exact vengeance against those wolf-riding bastards who cheat by using three attacks per turn
– If one of your high-level crossbowmen has the Berserk perk and manages to kill a bastard goblin, he can use his well-earned extra action points to fatally injure another, and then finish the bastard off on his next turn, etc. etc., so that he keeps gaining an extra attack per turn
