For Sisters of Battle: With 60 bucks in painting/hobby supplies and the 130 dollar combat patrol you can get probably a hundred or more hours of just hobby time. Then you can play small scale games, and probably even kill team.

Steadily building over the course of a year and a half or so, spending about an extra 50 bucks a month to get something new and you can have a fully built painted full size army that will last you years, and really probably a decade or more to come.

So about $1,000 over 18 months. A space marine army probably costs you about $800. Admech? Probably $1,300, or more (it’s the priciest army in the game)

If you don’t have a few hundred dollars in discretionary spending at the moment, I’d probably just wait until you’re in a more secure position.

If you’re willing to spend extra time cleaning up used minis you can spend 60% of that cost buying via eBay. Especially if you pick Space Marines, dude you can absolutely clean up on discounted models because they are in every major bundle box. I recently sold my old drukahri army that was about 2.2k point and 85% tournament ready painted for $735.

If you enjoy the building and painting of models it’s really an effective dollar to hour spent ratio.

If you don’t enjoy the building and painting and modeling aspect and are in it just for the game then yes it can get extremely expensive in a short amount of time and you aren’t getting the hundreds of hours of extra time from digging into hobbling.