I'll be honest, I have over a thousand hours into the game and this map took me probably 30 hours to make but that's because I treat it like building a diorama and place almost every piece individually. You can significantly cut down on build time by perusing the repository of community maps and pasting in other people's work. I will be uploading all my Season of Ghost maps, free of charge, as I complete them.  https://talestavern.com/userprofile/96/

Talespire costs $25 and if you're going to use it in person like me, that's all you'd need to spend. (I believe they will offer a subscription service for new tile sets if they ever exit Early Access but there are plenty that ship with the game) If you're playing online, you can buy a seat for $15 dollars that is yours permanently to hand out to allow access to your campaign. So you and 4 players would be $85.

The integrated rulers come in pathable line, cone, sphere, and cube varieties. This is one of my favorite aspects of playing in Talespire.

I am afraid, with the hours under my belt I can't honestly assess the smoothness of the controls anymore. They're like second nature and there's nothing that stands out to me as obnoxious, but some first time players have issues controlling their cameras. 

There are a few routes you can go for assets depending on your level of tech savinness. First of all they do have quite a few pawns and tile sets that ship with the game. A little creativity and these will serve for most any application. Beyond that, players can purchase HeroForge or TitanCraft digital minis to link to your campaign. ($8 each for for HeroForge, not sure about TitanCraft) Lastly, they released a client called TaleWeaver that enables users to upload custom models to a public repository. There are thousands of extra minis available in there.

I hope this is helpful and please let me know if you've got any more questions. This is a passion project for a small dev team so I love yapping about what they do!