As recent blog posts make suggest, I've been worried the Coolant system has been insufficiently cool. When adding to Titanomachina my instinct has been to introduce elements somewhat conservatively with the notion that it is better to make something better than to pare it back when it turns out to be over-powered. Needless to say that was not a problem with the Coolant system as the ability to deactivate systems had some weird knock-on effects in terms of card-play. Super-cooling a system to play it next turn screwed with tempo, essentially stealing a normally cooled system from its loading back to hand three rounds after it was played. It was a disappointing system for what I had imagined.
Instead, we tried playing Eurybia Quaternary vs Styxx Tertiary because both of them mount Coolant systems and Styxx mounted a Capacitor for comparative purposes. In this case we played it that Coolant systems just return a card to the players hand for every cog available when activated. This reflected the Capacitor system in that it returns cards to player's hands, except that Capacitors only returned cards that had been played face-down to activate other systems at a 2:1 ratio. This results in a savings in system charge, at the cost of time spent on the action. Coolant systems would return face-up at a 1:2 ratio, paying a steeper opportunity cost, but also a savings in system charge. What that means is that Eurybia with two Coolant systems was not giving up card advantage easily, keeping pace with Styxx and eventually grinding a win.
Perhaps interestingly there was no particular point at which I thought to myself (well, that's a mistake I should learn from), and Styxx maintained the initiative throughout the fight, which was probably pretty good. I think I may have under-utilized the Rapacious personality given how I lost significantly on habitats, but I think I came pretty close to a knock-out of Eurybia at times. Eurybia definitely benefitted from the Pugnacious personality, using that to avoid a one-two punch from Styxx's weapons.
From a design perspective, I think I might try it again against a Titan without coolant systems to see what advantage it confers, but for Styxx I just about shut down the Coolant system, Thrusters, and Deflectors to hound Eurybia around the board, and then use the Coolant system to keep the plasma shotgun in play in the late game. It's a handy trick rather than a work-horse system, it seems.
Please note it seems I forgot to get a screen-shot of round 4, which unfortunately breaks the spiral into the middle of the board that seems to have resulted from game play.
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