Question Maximum and minimum loads for a motion sim?

I've been thinking about motion sims for around a year now but have yet to really do anything with them, I'm thinking about going for it though and have been thinking about ways to reduce cost and build something cheap(under $500US). It seems to me the best thing to attack to lower cost would be the motors, particularly less of them that are smaller. I'd like to use leverage to accomplish this and am thinking of a 2dof with added traction loss. My first thought was just to do a lever style sim 3dof with counter balance on one end of the lever however I've went away from this because I don't think I would be able to reduce the motor size enough. None the less I'm still curious about it so here I am. My thought was that if you added a counter balance in the amount of the minimum load any given motor would carry and added half of the maximum load - minimum load you reduce the load by a fair bit, I don't actually know what those would be though. I came to the conclusion that the minimum load would be zero, if one of the levers is at the lowest position the motor would not have to move at all to keep it there and the maximum would be if all but one lever were lowest but one was at its highest, I assumed this amount would half of the total load(I'm honestly not entirely sure where I got this number from but there was some thought about it) Those were my assumptions but are they correct? And does it change at all based on the DOF?

I've got another question I figured I'd ask here as to not crowd things so much. Are there any examples here of people using leverage to reduce loads on the motor?

Anyways, Sorry for the longish post I'm not the best at explaining myself and am not the best at decided how much or how little backstory too add, Thanks in advance for anyone who responds.

Lots of people use gas struts or a heave spring to make the motors do less work

With a 2dof you have a universal joint under the cog so the motors do not have to support the weight of the sim

That's neat, So the main benefit of the spring is just that it allows heave and not so much that it reduces load? I would have never thought of that. How much do you think heave adds to the experience? It would be a bit more expensive but If I can get it to a point where very little force is needed I don't think it would be bad. I think my main goal in this is really just to see how far I can take the counter balancing. Thank you for the time, I'm gonna go do a bunch more research so I don't annoy too much with simple questions and hopefully start a build thread soon.

build a 2dof - its a good way to get started