What is a sensible reserve of points to take for summoning? Obviously it's there to stop you from just spamming reinforcements and overrunning your opponent with endless waves of stuff. But what's a reasonable amount for it? Given that units remain equally expensive it quickly ends up being 10-20% of your total point cost if you'd want it to be anything meaningfull, and even then you can't summon that much. And saving 50% of your total points seems a bit extreme. Furthermore, the more points you save the more you get into issues with the fact that you have to summon something logical at a sensible moment and the more risk you run of your slann being killed prematurely. So what abouts is sensible?
I would think at 1000-1500 I would put away 20%-25% at 2000-2500, 25%-30% and 3k+ anywhere from 25-50% depending on the tactics. Obviously others may play differently than I do, but I would say this is a fairly good rule of thumb.
The issue mostly lies with both extremly small and extremely large armies. With 1000-1500 points 20% is 2, maybe 3 summons at most really. And you can't even summon everything in our roster. Which seems like the actual summoning would be fairly insignificant in these fights. Yes of course that one tacticaly summoned unit of saurus guard did something genius with the objective. But it's not like at that level it's all that much different from similar abilities like stormstrike. Simply too small a reserve to be able to truly go and do something interestign (no room for "aha I see you've got no counter to X, now face my summoned army of doom". And this doesn't really improve until you go into a reserve of maybe 500-600 points and can actually summon a large force, or even lock down an enemy by summoning stuff around it in rapid succesion. On the other hand with extremely large armies (and larger reserves) don't you risk your slann immeadiatly being blown up? And/or trying to protect the slann means he's so far away from everything your summons can only really reinforce your battleline, but it's impossible to do stuff like summon someone behind the enemy. Or is it common to field multiple slann once you go past a certain point range?
For large games this is why I put it at 25-50% at 3k points you still have a 1500 point army on the table, so you shoulf be able to protect the slann long enough to get your summons, and have enough summoning that you should be able to get an engine to summon a new slann if needed.
It depends from a certain amount of things. Do you wanna to bypass the limit of number of behemoths? keep the exact number of points for your third Bastiladon, or for that additional Stegadon. For an all-comers reserve pool, i think 220-240 pts is enough. with those you can do one of those things: summon a trio of sallies with skink handlers summon 3 kroxigors and 3 skink handlers summon a warden ('cause the first one "died by cannonballs" in the first turn, protecting your Slann) and 10 skinks / warriors summon 2 x 5 Chama skinks because those daemons need some starvenom ... You don't need to have a huge reserve pool, you just need to know what kind of 3-4 tricks you want to accomplish and then decide on the moment which one serves you better.
Meh, that feels slightly off, doesn't help that the slann doesn't have many other spells to cast, especially with the rule of one. I'l play around a bit more and eventually we'l figure it out.