I add that when you have casual players in the search without a chat to communicate during the voting of the veto of maps it will be more frustrating than the current qs because you do not know the allied civilization and you cannot communicate with him to make sensible civ combos (I exclude op that much you can do it even now with a mate) and then it would make everything unbalanced and as always dominate the stronger civilizations like japan.
I add
1 point: Most players no longer play rush I don’t see why they should vote a map that favors rush and in my opinion the rush depends on the players, if they do it well, in these cases the opponent has to prepare the defense and if he is good it will prepare it on all maps so here we are going off the road.
2 point: The mind games are there because it is a strategy game so you cannot change it, if you choose the map first and after the civilizations the mind game does not change because the same situation occurs, just do not make visible the civilizations chosen by the opponents and everything is solved and no one drops the game if in case it happens I would recommend a nice Ban of 15 or 30 minutes so he won’t repeat it again.
The maps should not be few, you need to set a map pool with 5 votes or 2/3 map pools and vote for one of the 2/3 pools and then they will be chosen randomly (bea second alternative).