Setting up my solar system

I wouldn't worry too much about whether P-P-P-P, or S-S x P-P is better in shade. The truth is that shade patterns on panels is too variable and too unpredictable to mean anything. Shade is bad, avoid it. Instead, think more about low angles of sunlight during morning and evening hours. An MPPT controller is ideal for harvesting those extra fringe hours. With some portion of your array in series, the voltage hitting your controller will be higher than battery voltage for more of the day, than it would be with all in parallel. That's with 12v panels. 24v panels are better for the same reason. I don't recall if you said which panel voltage you were going to use. I kinda figured they would be 12v since you were getting 4 of them up there, but might be a bad assumption on my part.