More is better, but always within reason. And time is a consideration too. I used to work for a dry-steam sterilizer, and for the products we had validated, they often were only a couple of batches but with 20-40 samples taken pre and post treatment. The reason for high number of samples were to correlate to a cold spot study we did in the steam chamber, telling us which spots in the chamber were likely to be less efficient. As the chamber handled whole pallets of product, we also prioritized samples from the center of the pallets as it is most difficult to reach those middle boxes with heat.
These samples were used by the lab to initially validate our time and temp specifications for those products, create acceptable treatment parameters. We would sample a few months worth of future in similar ways to verify the initial results. So you can start heavy, get some good results of a log reduction, and verify consistency over the next few months. Wrap it up into a nice presentation and your auditors would struggle to find fault with the method.