The goons bot I wrote and is in the sim can probably be improved somewhat too, but there was a lot of trial and error on that stuff before working it out right, and a lot of conflating variables to work with.
At some point I had a simple Village+Goons built written up. Sadly it's been lost, but without any better draw than this, the chief differences were: buy villages decently early - I think sometime around when you have a goons, maybe two, village>silver, though I don't remember that very well. Don't buy coppers with a single goons in play until quite a bit later - around the time you'd buy duchies iirc. But always buy them if you have multiple goons in play. However, if you can build a drawing engine (without trashing) you sometimes might want to hold off even here. But as a pretty good rule of thumb, you generally want to buy them with double goons. And Big Money much earlier.