Scenario

Triangle - player one holds point A and is attacking B - player 2 holds B and is attacking point A from C - the combat at A will happen after the combat at B

Player 1 is on the attack and will win the combat taking control of B and then noticing (through the increased view) that player 2 has a specialist which changes the calculation for his defence at A (aka a king or general etc) so that he now looses where he thought he would win. Obviously at this point the time machine takes account of this new info and future projections are different....

BUT - on occasion the time machine will pre-feed this information into the projection - so player 1 knows they will loose at A before they capture B (and by studying the combat chat they can state exactly by what) - therefore planning to avoid the loss at A using information from the future!

I'm not sure exactly what condition trips this - but it seems to happen when the information is located in the extra area exposed by an Intel officer (or it may be that with an Intel officer this is just more likely to happen?)

Promoted specialists, because they generally have global effects, trigger a global notification that the player owns that specialist.

So you will know if a player has promoted to a General even if you don't see the Lieutenant or the actual promotion take place.

You can find a log of these notifications in the Event Log pane.

So a tactic I use, if I'm in a situation where I can promote to a General, is to wait and save that promotion right until I need it. This way a player sends attacks with less information.

Didn't work that way in my game - perhaps because the general had been gifted from player A to player B. My time machine specifically changed its expected outcome at a random point well before I got the Intel on where the general was. Perhaps this was when the gift was made to my enemy.

Additionally in the early game I was able to use the same precognition to tell when someone would first found a mine - The "X will win" dialogue would show up at the top for the first mine on the time machine based on someone else's preset orders - 36 hrs in the future!

Quite likely it wasn't him building a mine but taking one from an enemy instead. The game seems to be very good at keeping the fog of war up on the time machine IMHO