I'm making SVG game maps where a region on the map is a closed path. These regions usually share boundaries with one another so they often form a 'mesh' (consider a grid of squares or hexagons as examples, although for the maps the regions are rarely regular). To create them I have to copy and paste bits of path so that regions have nicely overlapping boundaries which works but is very tedious, particularly as I'd like to start building maps with large numbers of regions (>500).

I'm thinking I'd like to be able to start with a closed path (e.g. a continental outline) and treat it as a 'region mesh' - this would be like a normal closed path except that I could add a 'branch' node to it that would connect to another 'branch' node, creating two regions - these would be maintained as separate closed paths for export and the shared boundaries would always exactly overlap.

However, it seems likely someone has faced this problem before - there are lots of SVG maps out there that have regions defined in this manner. Can anyone point me towards a good solution for rapidly building a layer of map regions?