Ok, so I read this
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=battle_for_wesnothAnd what I got from it is, that the people who play that game are re-enacting life and battles from the past. And eventually their goal is to become something like the UN, where in the future they aren't just re-enacting, but being a form of "council" in current events.
No, Battle for Wesnoth, the actual software itself, is a historical re-enactment kind of game, in that you either succeed in enacting the pre-designed plot or you lose the game. Thus you play it again over and over until you succeed in playing out the actual historical events the scenario or campaign designers designed into it.
That whole free open source game, in single-player mode, consists of fun snippets of history you re-enact, trying to achieve the glorious victories that are already part of history.
Essentially it is a computer-aided-instruction program that has combat battle systems built into it as a great motivational tool to help keep the students interested in the history it is teaching.
Thus, that particular software is not much use for figuring out what WILL happen; its main use is in teaching what DID happen.
In theory its multi-player modes should someday get to a point where they could be useful in deciding what DOES happen, but we are not there yet.
Instead, we use Freeciv to determine what does happen in any particular year of history, on the broad outline whole-planet scale, which then serves as a backdrop against which individual adventurers can run around killing rats in sewers or whatever it is that they like to do. (The hack and slash players who don't care about nations and politics and so on except as excuses to hack something or slash something.)
In theory too though, once we identify specific actions on the Freeciv scale that could turn the tide of galactic history, we have a Temporal Nexus, where if by some means someone could cause a different outcome of a specific unit's battle against another specific unit, a whole different timeline would result. We thus keep a savegame of every gameturn of Freeciv throughout history, in case we ever do find time travellers manage to cause a change. They'd do it by going back to a specific savegame and branching off from it.
The Institute of Chronodynamics is actively researching such things, although according to the B.B.C. Doctor Who is purely fictional and does not actually change the timelines... Or at least not using current technology...
(Chronodynamics is one of the technologies added to Freeciv by the Galactic Ruleset used by the Galactic Milieu.)
-MarkM-