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I have a unit of shocktroopers I really would like to play with but they pop like over ripe tomatoes. I can get them to stick against other units but once a warbeast rears its ugly head then they disappear rather quickly. Any advice on what to do to make them last a bit longer?

To be fair, when a heavy warbeast rears it's head, most things disappear. It's what heavy warbeasts do best. I mean yeah you can spend heaps of extra points to get mechanics and a UA to let them heal them, and on someone to give them tough (not sure who), and this that and the other, but you're better off thinking 'well if the warbeast is going to get them, how can I ensure that the warbeast gets the minimum amount possible, and how can I ensure that I get the danged warbeast afterwards'. That's the key question. I mean, you could have a conquest, but if they send a buffed up bronzeback in, it's still going to trash it.

So, a) How can I ensure that the warbeast gets the minimum amount possible?

-be aware of your opponent's rules (does he have reach? Beat back? Something else extending his melee range/ability to move after attacks?) and adjust accordingly
-use terrain to your advantage. If you can sit just back from a wall, but close enough that the heavy warbeast base can't fit, then odds on he won't be able to reach you over that wall. And next turn you can advance and bring the pain.
-screening, get a cheap, renewable unit (looking at you alexia) to run interference in front of your valuable troops. But then again, shocktroopers are usually a screen themselves, for something like Demo Corps, Great Bears, etc, and once you start screening a screen you have to think if you are wasting points

b)how can I ensure that I get the danged warbeast afterwards

-hit it with an axe
-hit it with a gun
-hit it with a pike
-hit it with an axe again

-but seriously, that's about how it goes. Ensure that, if you can, you have units around to counterstrike, so that your opponent knows that he will lose the beast if he throws it in. The exceptions being fate walker (Molik Karn's animus), Sprint (a few sources) and Kaya's teleporting yo-yo shenanigans. And maybe something else, but not much. Basically, if you know your opponent can throw a beast in and it can run away, either push one or two Man-o-War beyond the others, so that he has to hit them and then pull back, leaving the other three, or find something to outthreat him/reach him when he thinks he's safe (Uhlans do a good job here). Alternatively, Ice Cage or something like that can ruin his plans next turn, if he intends to constantly yoyo, but that can lead to the loss of the ice caging unit.

What kind of lists do you normally run up against, and in what kind of lists are you running the Shocktroopers? That will help us give more specific advice. Hope this helps

Threadcromancy go!

Survivability of MOW shock troopers pretty much boils down to: Did you shield wall them. ARM21 vs ARM17 is a substantive difference. Even respectable warjack/beast P+S18 will be swinging at -3. This means it will take on average two unboosted swings to kill a MOW.

If your opponent is buying attacks on a heavy to kill your MOW, there is little you can do to prevent them from dying. On the upside, this means that your own heavy is likely advancing unmolested. In my experience, repairing your MOW is situational. Against armies with lots of POW10-16 that can't deal with the ARM21 - repairing them makes them practically invincible.

pIrusk can give them super-tough with his feat and eIrusk has a "tough" bubble that may extend their life. While MOW are almost always a poor choice for Iron Flesh, making them DEF14 will generally increase their lives substantively vs warjacks/beasts who have MAT6 usually.

I've only run two flavors of MOW heavy lists. pButcher's Heart of Darkness (8 point MOWs!!!) and eIrusk's Heavy Armor Battalion. eIrusk is more flexible, as you get tough, tactical supremacy stops you from jamming your own medium bases, battle lust fixes their lack of damage output, you have FFE+Gun Carriage and access to IFK. pButcher plays very straight forward, his feat patches some of the shock trooper's lack of damage output but still has some nice bonuses.

The best way to run Shocktroopers is with eIrusk and an Iron Fang Kovnik to make them faster when advancing in Shield Wall.

Their biggest problem is their low speed. By the time they get to where they're going, its too late for them to do what they do. And that is take a beating(and die) so your other stuff doesn't.

eIrusk and Kovnik can make them fast enough to do their job. But they're still a subpar choice.

really? a month is what we get for "threadomancy"? i'm finna Asphyxious-ate this topic...

Shocktroopers are AMAZING tarpits, or rather BRICKS. they jam up, do shield wall, get buffed by (hopefully) someone, and they survive a turn's backlash enough to hit back. my XP is that they don't really hit too hard (despite reach and stats), but they are amazing at blocking a whole charging line and shutting it DOWN.

Irusk1 theme force is rad for this.

I find that if you go MOW heavy - you don't have to worry about them being left behind the rest of the army. The issue is their low damage output makes them vulnerable to being jammed. eIrusk's FFE + gun carriage pretty much splatters enemy jam units.

Yeah, but when you do that your opponent just grabs the objective and, as you said, jams you and wins on scenario.

Gun Carriage, FFE or not, isn't going to solve that problem.

I never used him, but I thought it would be good to use the MoW Mech officer and run battle mechaniks behind the MoW. It's not going to get there fast, but it will stay there.

The MOW mech officer costs 5 points because you can't run him by himself. I find that unless you are running lots of things that you can fix with the mechanics... it is not worth 5 points since 5 points is better spent on strong offense to offset the low output of the shock troopers.

I ran that unit in a list that had 15 MOWs and it made the shock troopers almost impossible to remove, but this was in a friendly MOW vs MOW game. YMMV.