Cool.
Edit: saw you edited more details into your earlier post. Let me work on this some more. In the meantime I'll leave this...
One neat combo one of my opponents did with assault marines last weekend was using sgts with a pair of hand flamers. He was using Blood Angels, obviously, but you could easily use
BA rules for your army. Picking up some hand flamers from
BA players locally or online should be really cheap, as no one used to use them, so we've all got extras. An
AM squad in a pod hit turn one and immediately laid out 4 flamer templates- two and S4 from the squad, 2 at S3 from the sgt. Pretty cool.
am new to 6th ed the game first time playing in over 5 years. I lost every game. The guys there just seemed to shoot through every ruin and said it was a 5 plus cover save. I met some nice people but for the most part creepy socially awkward nerds that seemed offended to meet a newb. Even got bitched at by the gw rep at the store for putting my shoe box full of minis on the table for some unknown reason.
Yeah the LOS seemed stupid But I just went with it cuz Im new to 6th and my experience to the game is very limited. I fought Dark eldar and IG Nothing else yet. I got decimated with zero effort.
And we played Dawn of war, the scouring, and some other mission with only two objectives.
I have played less then 10 games in my entire history with 40k.
Well, after such a long break, and having accidentally selected a suboptimal army due to misunderstanding a critically-important rule, naturally you're starting at a handicap. Persistance and a willingness to learn are going to be necessary to get through this tough part and start winning. There are a lot of nuances to the game and it's even tougher when you're up against someone who's taking advantage and/or misplaying some rules. The task will be trickier if you can only play against guys who aren't helpful, but hopefully that's not the case.
LOS is "True"
LOS in 5th and 6th ed. So yes, you can usually see through most terrain, and it grants a cover save for shooting across it, as long as the model taking the wound is obscured at least 25% from the perspective of at least one model in the firing unit.. Most terrain gives 5+; the most common exceptions are Ruins (4+) and hill crests (4+). There should be at least SOME terrain which actually fully blocks
LOS on the table; Ruins with some solid walls on the ground floor, solid rock formations, hills 2" or taller, etc. If there isn't any, the table has bad terrain and you should (politely) require there to be more, including at least a few pieces which actually block
LOS and can hide units. Otherwise the game's going to be a shooting gallery.
On the plus side, playing book missions should work pretty well for you. They're fairly straightforward, and aside from Purge the Alien, they're won by holding more objectives, not based on who does more damage. One really nice thing about 5th and 6th eds is the missions, because you can get your ass shot off and still win by having superior positioning and holding more objectives at the end. This levels the playing field a good bit when one player has a stronger army, but the other player is smart and focuses on the mission.
The Dark eldar player had Eldar allies and used misfortune. Pretty much ate my army to gak.
The Imperial Guard player I fought was using some kind of forge world army list that was terribly imbalanced. 3pts per conscript. Had like a billion of them. Needless to say after my pods fell they were dead on the turn with a rule called intercept.
That Dark Eldar/Eldar combo can be very nasty. They put out a lot of shooting, and their psychic powers can be extremely strong. One possible counter to the psychic shenanigans would be allying in a squad of
SW Grey Hunters and a Rune Priest, also in a pod. The priest can cancel any psychic powers used within 24" of him on a 4+. Grey Hunters are also very good in a pod; they have bolters like
Tac marines, and also
BP&
CCW and csn take double special weapons like assault marines.
The other solution to Dark Eldar is just generally having a lot of bodies and getting the first shot wherever you can. Most of their units are pretty fragile to shooting, and pods help you get the first shot on something before he counters, so this is a potentially winnable matchup. A lot of it is going to come down to practice and learning what the most important targets/threats are. Things you can kill or cripple reliably which are also dangerous to you.
The
IG army sound like maybe Vraks Renegades? Was he rolling to find out what the
LD of his units was? If it's the guys I'm thinking of they're dirt cheap and can bring a ton of heavy weapons, but they don't get all the upgrades and equipment that regular
IG do, they've got a lot of guys with even lower
BS than normal (like 2), and their
LD is random, and a lot of squads will tend to be easy to make run if you can force morale tests. Against a really numerous guard army like this, flamer squads in pods should be able to do quite a bit of damage and likely force morale tests on multiple units. You can target a squad BEHIND the one that's right in front of you, and as long as your flamer templates can reach the back squad, and are placed so as to maximize hits on that back squad, you also can hit any intervening enemy models between you. So you can potentially hurt and/or break two (or conceivably even more, if they're really bunched up) squads at once. Also, the turn after you drop, don't be afraid to charge multiple squads at once (if they're close enough together), at least as long as you've got more than 2 or 3 marines left.
What did he have with Interceptor? Normally each unit with Interceptor can fire at one of your units that arrived from Reserve this turn. They fire at the end of your movement phase, and any weapon with Interceptor which fires on your turn isn't allowed to fire on
HIS following turn. I'd be surprised if he had more than one or two things with Interceptor, although I guess he could have had several with Forge World/Imperial Armor units. The one exception to this that I can think of is Inquisitor Coteaz from the Grey Knights codex; he can give one of his units a free round of shooting in your turn at EVERY unit which arrives within 12" of Coteaz. Super nasty, but pretty easy to avoid by not dropping near Coteaz.
Is there a way to win with the pods should I retool the list to make the Assault squads regular tactical squads, in pods? I must stress that I don't have additional funds to purchase a whole new army.
I miss read the the rules about open topped vehicles and assault when I was buying the army/ painting modeling the army.
Typically 1500 points. I'm thinking about just doing a 1000 point army to make it more balanced considering I've recently learned that assault marines are utterly garbage.
I play with Imperial Fists but I have heavily considered using a blood angels codex. I had no idea command squads suck.
Yes, pods can win. Tactical squads are one option, to be able to do more damage in the shooting phase when you drop. They're also cheaper and scoring. The other option is the
BA codex, which makes your Assault Marines Troops, so they can score, and gives them more weapon options. Blood Angels also have Sanguinary Priests in Elite, which are useful 1W Independent Characters who act like a suped-up Apothecary with a radius. Every
BA unit that has at least one model within 6" of him gets Feel No Pain and Furious Assault. You don't want to take too many of these guys, as you want to save points for more dudes, but even one or two of these guys can make your squads considerably more durable.
BA also have a nice alternative to command squads, in Honor Guard squads. Honor Guard work much the same way as command squads, only they come with a free Sang Priest built in, and every guy except the priest can take a special weapon (or even two, if he swaps out both his pistol and his chainsword). So the 5 man squad can have up to four flamers, meltas, plasmas, or a combination.
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
Chrome Novas 
Angels:Aurora (The Ascension Angels) 
Sons of Molossia 
Wildrunners (101st LocBat /H-K) 
Eradication Angels 
Neutral Bay (Echoworld) Exodites.