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For $100 and no DIY I'd say your only option is mdf.
If you want it to cover all of those themes you'll be hard pushed.
Good luck.
Personally, for $100 I'd go down the DIY route and make some generic and scaleless hills, trees and rock spires and a board to match. After that I'd start saving for more themed pieces for each system.
Oli: Can I be an orc?
Everyone: No.
Oli: But it fits through the doors, Look!
Foamcore is your only option on that budget. Even most MDF would cost too much to cover a table with enough terrain. It's pretty easy to work with, and you can get it in a variety of colors, including colored foam 'core'. Choose a grey and you don't need to paint anything. Add a little detail with markers. Minimal DIY work, just lay out your parts and cut them out with a sharp knife, assemble with hot glue.
I'd recommend foamed PVC rather than foamcore. I've built most of this out of the stuff and the sheet material itself probably cost about £50. Shipping and superglue would probably bump it all closer to 100, and then I've splashed out on random other stuff to make the buildings look pretty. There is probably another £20 of plastic radiator pipe and cheap brass fittings for pipework.
Check out Plastcraft for cheap usable scenery. £4 for a decent sized container. Hard to get much cheaper than that.
Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!
How cheap you want to go buddy ?
Scrap plywood, chicken wire, a bunch of paper, a mix of watered down school glue + flower, and drywall compound is probably the absolutely cheapest way to make terrain in a diorama.
You use the chicken wire to make the basic shapes you want, use the newspaper + glue/flower to cover the basic shapes, and than use the drywall compound to smooth & carve in the details.
It's going to be very heavy, but ya' could make a square meter of landscape for under $30 USD + a couple $ for cheap acrylic paint.
I'e done this a few times - not recommended for anything you plan on moving around as it is heavy.
I can't recall who made it but I had some nice modular SciFi terrain, was a pretty decent price but that may have been because it was older stock. I bought a guard tower kit and a bunker/fort one for about $30 and $50 each. It was enough to do about half my 6x4 board, but I also kitbashed the heck out of those two kits. The entire kit was basically just different panels and different shaped push fit clips to create flat sections or corners, and it came with no instructions, just a picture. So I made sure to build them so I had spare stuff to make extra things with.
I'm sure a quick google search for modular SciFi terrain kits should yield some pretty efficient results, but $100 is probably not enough to really fill a decent table. I'd say double that and then you will have a really decent collection.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Battlezones by Mantic Games!
I googled it for you.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2019/02/12 05:10:10
Scour car-boot/garage sales for second hand aquarium decorations. Also, if you live close to the coast, beaches are good places to find driftwood, especially after storms.
I've had alot of fun building my own ruins out of foam board from the dollar store. I painted them gray added some baking soda for snow and built a few rubble piles with barrels. The whole thing cost less than 20$ and I got a lot of terrain out of it. You can build gakky bunkers, rubble piles, walls, bridges. Add some bits like a crate or ammo cache or even discarded bolter clips and shells. You can do alot. Not every building has windows. And you can convert dollar store bird houses into cheap terrain.
Good luck. Watch YouTube videos on cheaper terrain. Start small
If you already have a full set of ink cartridges in your printer, I'd suggest getting some medium card (or thick matte photo paper) and printing out some paper terrain. Even on thin card it'll be surprisingly resilient as long as you're careful.
For maximum crossover, though, I'd suggest hills and other ground features and plant life. Cheap aquarium plants, you can make taller plants and trees by shredding some foam, painting it green and gluing it in clumps to twigs and using them as trees. or make some of the legendary red-spined cacti that 40k players of a certain age will remember.
If you are going to do rubble, you could get random sweeping from your desk/bits box and just random stuff, cut up and otherwise. (hell model box cardboard works well enough)
Layers of thin ply work well, break them up and put a black wash to make them look sooty.
Use random junk pieces of plastic that would usually go in the bin (just prime them with spray paint first) If they're mixed in/modified with recognizable Items they should blend better.
Make a mound out of air dry modelling clay (expanded foam board seems the be attainable for free from sign printing shops or something. it works for a base. put clay on base) and put the random stuff on/in it. You could also sculpt the clay to complement the scene.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Fly screen works well for fences and any kind of mesh Spray it silver with spray paint. Weather it.
Automatically Appended Next Post: If you are not going to sculpt the clay use plaster or filler instead.
Automatically Appended Next Post: You could make your 40k setting a battle field on a feudal world. That way there is no difference between it and an AOS battle field. Add a few advanced looking guffins to bluetack to certain pieces to make it more sci-fi.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2019/02/18 11:13:26
Example rubbish pile made from desk sweepings and random modelling offcuts.
I used crumpled up tinfoil underneath to give bulk before slathering PVA and rubbish all over it. Then some sprinklings of basing sand to hide any remaining visible foil. For some of the sticks and beams I cut a hole in the foil underneath so they would stick out rather than having ev3rything stuck flat to the surface of the pile.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/02/18 11:15:26
Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!
The problem is delivery from Ukraine to USA, last time I checked, few years ago, It was around $50-ish... So it would make sense to load up the order.
I have NOT got around to order anything from them before. So can't recommend anything from personal experience. But I was looking at their terrain sets and Artillery pieces and Robogear line vehicles.
Some day, some day for sure.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2019/02/21 21:22:28
If you want terrain for all I think maybe mud-brick buildings and desert. Could be starwars, age of sigmar, fantasty battles 40k and any historical period.
Automatically Appended Next Post: miniature scenery has a range of middle eastern buildings themed like this (MDF) for like $16 AUD each. so quite cheap.
Even if you don't want to make buildings, consider making hills or rocky outcrops from foam. Cheap and easy to make, fit any setting, and can complement purchased terrain bits.
Terrain making may seem daunting( its quite forgiving really). You-tube is a great resource to get you inspired and roaring, there's a lot of great channels out there.
Given your wide array of interests I'd suggest....
The terrain tutor
(generally low cost also has a series where he makes resources for terrain crafting for low cost)
Luke Aps Wyloch's Crafting
(low cost pieces (including shrine of Aquila)
Miscast Terrain
Scythern wrote: Mothsniper, are you confident of the scale of those? I don't speak a word or Russian, surprisingly, and at that price I assume it is a smaller scale
No, they're scaled right for 40K. They were everywhere a number of years back, although seem to have drawn their distribution back to just Russia.
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
