Hi Dave,
Sharpening is a very personal thing, so i can only tell you what has worked and works for me so far for the past 20 odd years.
I started out with a combination oil stone. Gave up on that quickly as i didn't get proper results and was messy, it was the stone recommended by the school i was attending. At that point in time i was very green behind the ears, so it was probably my lack of knowledge that got me poor results, didn't help with ignorant teachers either.
After that i bought my very first waterstone, a combination king 1000/6000. Only one stone to buy and for the steels i was sharpening back then it was just fine. I had a power grinder, so i ground hollow. Shortly after that i bought a Belgian stone for final polishing.
Get yourself a flat piece of float glass, stick on some 180-240 grit sandpaper to flatten the waterstones, the kings dish a lot quicker than some of the newer waterstone. A lot cheaper to start out with instead of getting xtra course diamond stone which you can use for flattening and primary grinding with your jig.
The type of steel you want to sharpen also can determine which type of stone to get. Harder metals fare better with some of the harder ceramic waterstones.
Some will say a combination stone is a waste, as one side get used up quicker than the other, but you can easily stick the remainig stone on a piece of glass and work up all of the stone.
If you want to go seperate stones, an 800, 1200 to 2000 grit stone and a 6000 or 8000 grit stone would be what i would recommend, but this is my personal opinion and you will get many a different one. King waterstones are fine, but there are a lot better choices when it comes to waterstones. For getting nicks out of the bevels you'll needs something courser, for that i recently got a sigma 400 grit stone, a beast of a stone, feels like an 800 stone, but chews metal like it's not there.
A brand i quite like is Cerax waterstones, which you can get from Dieter Schmidt's finetools.com shop. They have a lovely feel and give you lots of feedback something that will help you learn sharpening. They're on the softer side of ceramics though.
Though with all my waterstones, i'm considering to getting more diamond stones, just a lot less mess to deal with and a 1 micron diamond paste for final honing.
How much you want to spend ?