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Britannia RULEs The Waves
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OK, but to make this interesting the countries you pick must have 100% of their peak territory, and it cannot overlap with another country.
Good luck.
This sounds like a problem that would be covered in an algorithms class.
Something something knapsack problem, dynamic programming, something something
Well, even without this rule. On what basis should territory be attributed to one empire or the other? We get back to square one with this.
I feel like overlaps should be allowed otherwise certain regions (Iraq and its surroundings come to mind) will make it impossible
Overlaps would make for a nice heat map. Which areas in the world have been coveted the most?
Alright my plans for the evening got cancelled so I decided to have a go at working this out. Methodology, a term I am using somewhat loosely, was to go down wikipedia's list of largest empires, ignore each one that was already completely covered (the four big caliphates and several Chinese dynasties in particular), then take their peak territory from Geacron. Geacron isn't an ideal source here, not least because the only way to "export" from it without paying money is print screen, but it's good enough for these purposes. I also didn't bother filling in the entire map because a couple of places were basically just going to come down to whichever country had them today due to how difficult to conquer they have historically been. Priority in overlaps is given to the larger empire. The result is this: https://i.imgur.com/kLNjpSm.png
On here we have:
This list leaves Western Sahara, Liberia, Sweden, Slovakia, Nepal, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Antarctica for a total of 25 countries (or maybe 27 if you add Norway and Chile for maximum Antarctic coverage. I suppose you could also argue that the Treaty of Torsedillas granted half of Antarctica each to Spain and Portugal, not that either ever actually controlled it). Possibly also some islands, especially in the Pacific, but the map isn't in a high enough resolution to tell. The most contested areas are the Levant and Central Asia. Some big empires that aren't on the list include every Persian empire, the Ottomans, and Alexander's empire.
Jesus, that's intense. I knew it would be a bit choppy, but that is much choppier than I imagined. Thanks for sharing ๐