xcommiebastard

I've just started trying my hand at some modding, and now that I've done some research I could use some advice. I've enjoyed playing X-com, but I've always felt like the pacing of the original was more my play style. It's been a long time since I played UFO Defense, so this may be more feeling than fact, but it seemed like the game was stretched over a longer period, and there were more opportunities for UFO encounters, either landed or crashed. I was looking into how I could recreate this, and thought my best option was to run a Marathon Mode game, but after reading some more I thought that I could try to mod the imonth variable in the fillalienpool and getpossiblealien functions in XGstrategyAI. In my theory, this could lengthen the time over which the game can take place, and then I could alter the defaultgamecore file so that UFO's would appear more often. The advice I am looking for is if this will work at all. I don't know a lot about programming, but I'm assuming that since imonth is a local variable in both functions, I could change it there and it would not affect the rest of the game. I think I would have to change it to (imonth+1)/2 since that is how they implement it in the Marathon Mode, but I'm not sure what syntax to use, let alone what hex editing would need to be done. I was already able to make the changes I wanted in the defaultgamecore file with enabling the UFO's. Any help would be appreciated, Thanks!