An SSD would be of more benefit in an open world game like TS3, plus they have a lower failure rate at least upfront (no moving parts). But I get the price problem. I still think it's a good laptop choice for TS4. 16GB of RAM is more than enough, the game is optimized for lesser hardware anyways,
and if you could afford an HDD -> SSD upgrade in the future (who knows?), there are worse hardware replacements.