Raising the Legion: Prologue

My housemate used to say I probably had 10,000+ points of Space Marine models.  It turns out he's right.
The release of Warhammer 40,000: Apocalypse with its Epic 40k style ruleset made me wonder just what I could field in a game of Apocalypse.  The results were not too impressive as it comes out to around 450 PL; when the 'standard' Apocalypse game is meant to be 300 PL this is kind of small.  However the sheer list of models I figured I could actually break out and field made me wonder just how many points in Warhammer 40k those units would be.  Turned out to be around 10,000 points of Ultramarines before I started digging out models to confirm their existence/nonexistence (the number kept going up as I kept finding models I'd forgotten about).

Most of those are Ultramarines, the bulk of which are meant for use with the Horus Heresy ruleset.  I've got enough Ultramarine primaris marines and Carcharodons to field around 2000 points for each of those armies.  WH40k 8e's point costs are higher on average than what they were in 7th edition as well.  I figured if most of that was supposed to be for Heresy-era games, it would be better to cost them out under that ruleset.

As it turns out, I have roughly 12,000 points of Ultramarines for the Horus Heresy.  Even breaking them into 8e unit configurations comes out to around 12,000 points or so.  The estimated model count is 245, that vast majority of that being infantry models.  I've tried not to think about how large of a task this really is since it'll just demotivate me to get them done.

Which is why I should motivate myself to get the ball rolling on all these models, right?  The rules!  I have to paint/work on the models at least an hour a day.  I will post something every Wednesday with photos of the progress made.  I cannot buy new units; I can fill out a unit by buying new models but I couldn't simply add a new unit that I didn't already own models for.  This last part will be a bit weird because I own so many unassembled models that people might assume I'm cheating.  It also doesn't preclude anything people might give me.  To that end, I've created a list and progress tracker that can be found here.

With a few hundred models to work on, the natural question is: where do I start?  I personally decided I want to get the Legion Tactical Squads out of the way first because I'll improve my basic painting techniques in doing so, which means all the character models will look better when I do get to them.  So that's sixty models to get started with.