a.k.a rumor spreads its wing
In the world of Akeran, you do not get a real-time broadcast of events that take place on the other side of the Disc. Instead you have to rely mostly on rumors told by peddlers to spread from province to province, and the information you get may be not very precise and surely outdated, especially if the original event took place faraway.
At the exception of player events (new player, player killed, retired of eradicated by the gods), immediately sent, all game events reach your log through those messengers. The rumors spread to an adjacent province every moon but you are notified in your log only once, the first time the messenger reach a province where you own a city or have a unit at the market. Game events are essentially composed of battle event. Have a look at the sample messages below.
Of course, when the message is added to your log, due to messenger-lag, the battle is surely already over. But let's analyze the messages.
Travellers tell [...] fighting each other means the attacker, here Augen, has launched an assault using the attack command. So this time it took him 3 assaults to capture the target ... and remember you must wait 30 seconds before launching every new assault. The opportunity for the defender to send reinforcement is slight but exists nevertheless. Notice also that the following assault belong here to the same battle because they were launched shortly after the previous one and thus the units didn't had to go back to their lines. But they would have 15 minutes after the last assault had the fight not been over.
[...] has more bravely fought [...] indicate which one of the belligerants inflicted more damage. But inside a single battle, it however occurs that the tide of fight reverse itself.
At last, when you read that [...] The battlefield is covered with the blood of the braves, the battle is over, one side having defeated the other, with maybe some routed units still alive on the looser's side.
[...] has captured [...], if applicable, finally signals that the stake of the battle has been conquered. Knowing the city name you'll be able to check in which province the fight took place, provinding you have scouted far enough.
But there's more to guess in the message. You can evaluate the army size of the opponents. "a few units" means a small skirmish, up to 5 units. "some troops" involves an average number of units, from 6 to 20. And "the armies" definitely represents a major engagement, with more than 20 units. However, a few war lords are a lot greater threat than a whole army of spearmens...
Each player has a personal log, in which personal and game-wide events will be continuously added. You can choose which personal events are written to your log, the remaining events are kept as messages, displayed at logon and then erased.