Replay — Watching the Picture Change Over Time

A live map shows you now. But intelligence is often in the movement — where a front line was a week ago versus today, how an actor's territory expanded, the sequence in which incidents unfolded. Replay lets you scrub back through the recorded history of a situation and watch it develop, rather than inferring change from a single snapshot.

Opening replay

Open the Replay control from the header. It gives you a time scrubber across the situation's history: drag it, or step through, and the globe redraws to show the state of the picture as it was at that moment — the events that had occurred, the unit positions on record, and the territory each actor held.

What replays

Because the platform captures state over time rather than only the latest value, several things move under replay:

• Events appear in the order they actually occurred, so you can watch an escalation build.
• Unit positions track their recorded movement, with position history behind each unit.
• Actor territory — both where a force physically was and where it held sway — expands and contracts as you scrub, which is the most vivid way to show a front line shifting.

Why it matters

Replay turns assertion into demonstration. "Their control expanded south over the last fortnight" is a claim; showing the territory creep across the map as you drag the scrubber is evidence. It's one of the most persuasive artefacts you can bring to a brief — and a fast way to sanity-check your own read of a situation by watching it unfold instead of reconstructing it from memory.

It also complements the platform's forward-looking tools: replay shows where a situation has been, while escalation and movement analysis estimate where it may be heading. Read together, they give you trajectory in both directions.

Good practice

• Scrub before you brief. Reviewing the run-up to the current state often surfaces the sequence that explains it.
• Pair replay with the causal graph. Replay shows when things happened on the map; the graph shows how they relate.
• Watch territory, not just markers. The shape of control over time usually tells the story faster than individual events.

Where to next

• Actors & Territory — the control and influence that replay animates.
• The Intel Causal Graph — cause and effect behind the changes you replay.