Better Maps/Polygon Maps

Conceptual Overview

The purpose of this is to generate a bottom-up system of regions, duchies, realms, etc. So we start from the lowest reasonable element and build up.

Walkthrough

Our "unit" will be the place. A place is a single meaningful spot on the map and its related areas. The "spot" could be a village, a town, a castle or a city. Basically, a settlement. The area around it is the area this settlement claims as its own, belongs to it geographically. We could go looking for geographic features and derive the area from that, but it is easier to do it the other way around: Draw Voronoi cells around the settlements and define the geographic features based on their edges. This gives us a basic segmentation of our map, for example like shown on the right. The dots in this image are the settlements, and the lines are the borders between areas. The "tiles" are the places.
Let us select three places at random and use them for the following examples:
Estates An estate is a knights place of residence. It is always located in a place, but it can control several places. So a single knight could control a village, or he could control a castle and three surrounding villages, etc. In our example, this could look like shown on the right. The middle estate only controls one place, but it's a pretty large place. The two other estates control several places. So in the example bottom-left, you have the place X which also rules the other three nearby places.
Regions Estates can band together to form regions. A region is an area that will be visible on the world map. Every estate always belongs to a region, though it can "belong" to itself, just like places always belong to an estate. So place, estate and region can all be the identical one unit, though that is unlikely. In our example, the two left-most estates belong to the same region, so they are now part of the same hierarchy, and their knights share a common lord. If in our example the leftmost estate is the region "capital", then the other estate would be its vassal.

(to be continued, please do not edit)