Can someone explain to me how SC FOOM works in game mechanics terms? I thought that in order to raise skills the primary currency is XP, with training only needed to justify expenditure. How do Shadow Clones exponentially play into that? Or has there been a rules change/clarification specifically regarding that?
Compounding Paperclipped's explanation, getting deeper into the mechanics:
For every 3 hours of Shadow Clone training (one 'training block') you get 10% of your base XP that day as bonus XP. This stacks across multiple clones (2 clones each training for 3 hours gives +20% for that day) and if you do multiple training blocks in a day (1 clone training for 9 hours gives +30% for that day). It has to be 3 hours in one go, though, so you can only start training when you hit SC 30 and your clones last for 3 hours. In addition, a single clone can only train for 9 hours a day, any further training on that one clone gives no benefit.
But the real meat and potatoes is the Resolve check when a clone pops. Based on how many total clone-hours you've used that day, an 'attack' of sorts is made against you, opposed by Resolve. Failing the check can cause you shifts of damage (which quickly fade) or Mental Consequences, which don't. As such, the number we care most about is how many clone-hours we can safely run in a given day, without risk of our heads exploding.
(It should be noted that when clones pop in sequence, there's a Resolve roll for each clone of escalating difficulty as the clone-hours accumulate after each pop, but if clones pop simultaneously it's just one Resolve check with the DC based on all of the clone-hours, and as such it's always optimal to simul-pop, and we can assume with FOOM that this is what we do)
We know how the DC is formed and we know our Resolve stats, and everything else to simulate the roll, so this is a solvable problem. Since our Resolve defense involves rolling Fudge Dice (4 dice of {-3, 0, +3}) there's some randomness, but it's constrained. As a result, we can figure out how many clone-hours we can run while having no risk of taking a Mild Consequence even on a -12, and thus perfectly guarantee our safety.
(we actually only go for 'safe on -6', because -9 and -12 are really rare and Mild Consequences are mild enough that it's more efficient overall to squeeze a couple more training blocks in even though we'll get a Mild Consequence every so often. The effects of consequences are accounted for in our model, as well.)
The clone-hours is the primary gate on how much SC training we can do in a day, and that increases with our Resolve, but we also have to factor in our Chakra Reserves. Shadow Clone costs 150 CP plus 25 CP per clone created, and as such 4 clones would cost a total of 250 chakra, almost all of all of our pools. Akane can swing 5 clones, but nobody can do 6 clones at once. Two things reduce this limitation: SC 40 and Noburi refills.
The chakra cost is per-clone, and at SC 40 you get three times as many training blocks per clone as you do as SC 30. So even though SC 40 doesn't help us squeeze more clone-hours in (much, it does have a small bonus of its own), it helps us advance past CR limitations and keep on the Resolve highway.
Noburi refills are mainly contingent on the koi being operational, at which point we can draw chakra from the koi to do multiple rounds of SC casting, all but eliminating the CR limitation. The trick is that a) we don't currently have the koi setup operational, and b) even the koi have their limits, and high-end FOOM gets
really chakra-hungry if we want to stay at SC 30, so even with the koi we'll want SC 40 sooner or later.
Also yes, it's not an exponential situation, but what it does give us is something more precious than gold: a higher XP rate. We started this quest with something like 2.5 XP/day base, now we're between 3.5 and 4 XP/day because the hivemind ruthlessly optimized Hazou, and it's given us the base stats to stand a chance against clan heirs if we have a clever plan. 10 XP/day is the ludicrous pie-in-the-sky meme numbers we reserve for discussions of the S-rankers of the setting...
...and by the time we're done FOOMing we'll be swinging 15 XP/day.
It's a long-term plan, taking about 5 years to get to that point, but I cannot stress enough how valuable this is to us. XP rate is extremely hard to affect, and the two other jutsu we have that affect it (Pangolin Conditioning Jutsu and Yamanaka Training Jutsu), despite being wonderful treasures people would kill for, pale in comparison to FOOM. We will be
gods.
