I'm building an Island. I use the classical heightmap solution : with a hill-building function, avoiding the corners of the map, I make altitude. Then, perlin noise give me some climatic variables to handle the biomes. Now, I'm facing two challenges who are, in some way, connected :

• In Dwarf Fortress, one of the neat aspects of world generation is how the game seems to "know" areas, and give them names, though they are not rectangular shapes. I would like to be able to "recognize" my forests, my rivers, my hills... any idea what kind of algorithm I could use to scan my map and interpret its areas ? And how would you store that ? I'm using a basic C++ graph made out of a vector of vector of "tiles object".

• This Island should be divided in political areas, not only purely natural regions. I could use mountains and rivers to make "natural borders", but my procedurally generated map doesn't garantee I will have nice "enclaves" that would form a kingdom ; I could find myself having a gigantic "ribbon-formed" political areas surounded by micro-kingdoms. Another possibility would be to look for appropriate areas for a city or a castle. Then, "grow" a political area around it. But there again, I'd like to have some well-known algorithms before trying to devise my own.

This question could be interpreted as a bit too vague, so one way of rephrasing it would be : how to partition (without modifying !) a procedurally generated world into areas suitable for gameplay ? Thanks in advance for your help.