[Aesaar]

Would it be possible to have an option somewhere that stops EMP from affecting messages?  It singlehandedly prevents the use of EMP weapons in non-voice-acted campaigns.  Which is a shame because EMP has a lot of gameplay possibilities.

[General Battuta]

+1 have wanted for years. A mod options or game settings thing?

[Goober5000]

That's kind of the point of EMP though, isn't it?

That said, this sort of option would be easy to add.

[General Battuta]

EMP does a lot of other cool stuff - ****s up your HUD, stops bombs, makes the AI go nuts (breaking your mission, LOL). All of those are awesome tools for mission designers BUT we can't use them because the HUD scramble makes it easy to permanently miss vital text messages.

Super duper cool to have this feature, EMP doesn't EMP messages or whatever.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Anyone have a preference for mod table or AI profile? The latter would let you disable it only for some missions, if you have some missions voiced and some not (and want to use EMP effects in both).

[General Battuta]

AI profile feels like the right choice to me, because it's more powerful. You might want to do one mission with weapon EMP not scrambling messages, and another with nebula EMP ****ing everything up (although then weapons would EMP messages in that mission but WHATEVER)

[karajorma]

Depending on how much of a pain it would be to do, I'd be tempted to suggest splitting those effects into separate flags and having EMP just turn them all on. And then maybe add something for EMP nebulae etc. Because then you could do cool stuff like have bomb suppression area effect weapons. Depends also on whether people want that.

[z64555]

What about the message backlog? Does that get scrambled as well during the EMP hits?

[Goober5000]

The message backlog records whatever was on the screen.  If the text was scrambled, the logged message is scrambled; if it wasn't, it isn't.

[General Battuta]

The idea of splitting up all the effects is a really good idea. I would very much like to be able to scramble HUD without changing target, for instance.

[Mongoose]

The message backlog records whatever was on the screen.  If the text was scrambled, the logged message is scrambled; if it wasn't, it isn't.

Yeah, that always really sucked in As Lightning Fall.  You hit F4 to try and read the actual plot-relevant messages and are met with the same WHARRGARBL that you heard earlier.