I disagree slightly here. If you have identified a transaction that you now know is going to lock a large number of rows, I would first consider using the LOCK TABLE command to ensure the transaction used only a single table lock for the table (as it will be locking most of the table anyway).
The lock escalation settings are of more use for unpredictable ad-hoc user queries. The main issue with lock escalation is that if there is even a single incompatible lock on another row in the table, ASE will not be able to escalate to a table lock, which makes the settings irrelevant.
-bret