Particles not Playing Right Away with PlayOnAwake Off

Having a strange issue…

With the PlayOnAwake option toggled on, the ParticleSystem emits particles when I tell it to via a script with Emit(). Of course this makes the ParticleSystem emit an intial burst of particles when the game starts, which I do not want. However, once I toggle off the PlayOnAwake option, the particle system won’t emit particles until maybe 10-20 seconds after the game starts.

I’ve solved this by setting the maxParticles property on the ParticleSystem and then calling the Play() method. Not sure why Emit() doesn’t work though.