As far as command abilities: Command points make teleport alpha strikes a lot more reliable. Before, if you wanted maximum reliability on an alpha strike, you needed a vast intellect slann and a foot Oldblood leading the bloodclaw with a cold one scar vet to teleport 40 saurus, then reform them to 6" away instead of 9" and only need a 4+ on the charge roll, re-rolling 1s). With command points, you can bring an Oldblood on foot with a Sunclaw and a Slann, and you can make that alpha strike with maximum reliability. Now, with the Chronomantic Cogs endless spell, you can get another +2 to charge rolls and make those teleport alpha strikes even harder to fail.
Seraphon have a lot of strong command abilities in their Saurus heroes that previously couldn't be utilized without either bringing a Bloodclaw (Which is a massive points investment that take 4 hero slots) or not making a Slann the general, so I expect many of them will start seeing more use. The only saurus command ability that isn't really notable is the Sunblood's command ability, because it's redundant when you have an astrolith bearer, which I don't think many lists will be passing up with the new summoning rules.
A Bastiladon is 18 summoning points if that info is correct.
It was 24 if the other thread was correct. Also, Kroak on a Balewind gets 5 spells, so 3 less summoning points per turn. The cap would be at 19, unless you also bring the cogs and use them for a 6th spell, but that's probably just overkill.
For summoning, I think we'll mostly want to be summoning Bastiladons, Skinks, Kroxigors, and Terradons. The rest of the options are either a bit too low impact or better when included as part of the army. Kroxigors have a specific niche against horde armies with the moonhammer, and Terradons have a 1-off ability to do some mortal wounds, which we don't have a lot of access to. Bastiladons get a "discount" through summoning at only 24 points to summon (if you assume each summoning point is worth ~10pts), and they're a ranged unit, so they'll always be able to have an immediate impact on the game. Skinks are chaff, and can be summoned to block charges, provide a bit of extra missile damage, or contest objectives with some extra bodies.
Because summoning happens in the movement phase (unless you roll a 14-17 on an engine of the gods?), I think we'll generally want to avoid summoning heroes and saurus units, as they can't cast spells, use command abilities, or charge reliably right away. The exception is perhaps bringing in 5 guard to block a charge from something that can't do mortal wounds, but even still, 10-20 skinks is most likely just a better option.
With the combination of summoning, points changes, shooting changes, and command points, I expect we'll see a rise in some more combat oriented lists that have the flexibility to alpha strike, with skinks mostly being brought to the table as a result of summoning, rather than being brought in the initial army. We've already seen some such lists do well in recent tournaments, and they're almost strictly getting better, while the alternatives are mostly getting a bit worse for us due to the removal of the point reduction for maximum size skink units, and the changes to shooting making Bastiladons locked in combat less flexible, and the change to Mystic shield making Bastiladons a bit weaker anyway.
Kroaknado will still be around, but it's losing some power with the change to the Balewind, though Umbral spell portal adds another option for it, and the look out sir rule helps Kroak a lot when he's not on a balewind. Thunderquake is losing some power with the shooting and mystic shield changes.
I don't think going all in on summoning with Kroak will be worth it in the end though. His spells just do too many mortal wounds to consider not casting in favor of some extra summoning points, and he's too many points to do nothing with on the first turn; a regular slann can still generate 13 summoning points every turn with a balewind, and that saves you 190 points. Since nothing costs more than 24 points to summon, you don't really want to generate more than 12 points a turn anyway. Getting 14-16 doesn't add any significant benefit over getting 11-13 in a turn, and you can't get more than 16 on turn 1, even with kroak and a balewind, as one of his spells needs to be invested into summoning it in the first place.
