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I have been around for a while, and have started planning out my Ultramarines. I've seen other lists, and they seem to fall into a few well-defined point counts, like 1850 pts. Is there a reason for these common point counts, and what are they?
Thanks,
David

It's what the tournaments in the area are playing 99% of the time.

Tourney guys usually grab a lot of games so they can test their lists, and so casual players will pick those point values because that's what most likely to get them a game.

Just kind of snowballs

Smallest game you will see is generally 500 points, and generally reserved only for people just starting and still learning the rules. Anything smaller will almost certainly be kill team rules, which is basically a completely separate game.

1000 or 1250 is a small game, not overly common as it's quite limiting on bigger toys an units, and some peoples favourite combos aren't viable at this level.

1500 is a mid sized game and many moons ago used to be tourney standard, and you weren't allowed to take certain named characters below 1500 points. This and 1250 are a good compromise between lots of stuff and a shorter game. IMHO, this is where the better side of balance is between msu and deathstars.

1750 used to be the tournament size until a few years ago when it got bumped to 1850 because reasons. You don't see too many tournament games much bigger than this due to time constraints, but they do exist.

2000/2500 are the common larger points games before you start questioning why you're not running apocalypse games (not that there's much difference between that and normal 40k these days). 2k used to be the limit of taking 2 cads in 6th, and there was a breakpoint at 2k in older editions for something else iirc.

Most are arbitrary, some have reasons that are no longer relevant, most games these days are 1850 for tournaments or whatever you have time for, but while I'd wager a majority are 1850, like most things, your meta determines what's important to you. No point building for 1850 if your local plays 1250.

Our local GW store does 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 point tournaments. A lot of the non-GW tournaments run 1850. A lot of groups seem to enjoy 1000 and 1250. It really varies a lot -- it depends on the kinds of collections that people in your area own, how long a game the like, how large models they like to play, and that kind of thing.

Incidentally, there's also Kill Team, which is 200 points (and although models are taken as codex squads, they are all effectively played as independent characters with no cohesion rules). There's a group here locally that has lots of fun with it.

Thanks for the replies!
I did some calculating with Battlescribe, and it's not too hard to make a SM demi-company come out to 1000 pts, so this makes sense.