This paper deals with Coulomb gases at an intermediate temperature regime. We define a local empirical field and identify a critical temperature scaling. We show that if the scaling of the temperature is supercritical, the local empirical field satisfies an LDP with an entropy-based rate function. We also show that if the scaling of the temperature is subcritical, the local empirical field satisfies an LDP with an energy-based rate function. In the critical temperature scaling regime, we derive an LDP-type result in which the "rate function" features the competition of an entropy and energy terms. An important idea in this work is to exploit the different scaling relations satisfied by the Coulomb energy and the entropy.