Data & Credits
Every ranking in Sector 196 is built from real-world data wherever it exists, or from our own documented assessment where no open data does. Figures are rounded and simplified for a game — treat them as a good guide, not an official statistic.
The 8 categories
| Category | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Military | Our own assessment of four factors (troops, defence spending, equipment, strategic reach), scored from widely reported public figures | — |
| Population | World Bank, Population, total (SP.POP.TOTL). Taiwan: Ministry of the Interior, Taiwan | CC BY 4.0 / Taiwan Open Government Data |
| Food Production | World Bank, Agriculture, forestry and fishing, value added (NV.AGR.TOTL.CD); a few estimates where no figure exists | CC BY 4.0 |
| Industry | World Bank, Manufacturing, value added (NV.IND.MANF.CD); hand-placed where no figure exists | CC BY 4.0 |
| Natural Resources | Our own assessment of reserves and output, cross-checked against World Bank, Total natural resource rents (NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS) | CC BY 4.0 (World Bank data) |
| Economy | World Bank, GDP (NY.GDP.MKTP.CD). Cuba, Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Eritrea: IMF World Economic Outlook. Taiwan: DGBAS. North Korea: Bank of Korea estimate | CC BY 4.0 / IMF terms (with attribution) |
| Innovation | WIPO, Global Innovation Index 2025; hand-placed where not covered | CC BY 4.0 |
| Location | Our own assessment: strategic position, defensibility, climate stability and territory size (land area) | — |
World Bank data: World Bank Open Data, licensed under CC BY 4.0. WIPO: Global Innovation Index 2025, CC BY 4.0. IMF: World Economic Outlook. Our own adjustments: values are rounded, ranked 1–196 and grouped into five tiers for the game.
The Greatest Empires
The ladder is ordered by our own assessment of how dominant each empire was in its own world. Background figures on population, economy and land come from the Maddison Project Database 2023 (Bolt and van Zanden, CC BY 4.0) and standard historical estimates.
Artwork and code
- World map: BlankMap-World-Microstates, Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
- Flags: flag-icons by Panayiotis Lipiridis (MIT licence)
- Icons by Lorc, Delapouite and Faithtoken from game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)
- Fonts: Rajdhani, Inter and JetBrains Mono via Google Fonts (SIL Open Font Licence)
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