I usually play random map skirmish against AI and the only time I manually set up a game’s civs and map is if I want to do something I feel is historical or thematic. I’ve been doing this a lot with the new european maps, having a great time playing the British defending against the French on the England map, for example. I’ve also loved the historical maps and the way they force certain civs.
So my idea is that in the map choosing screen there should be another option beside Random, Random Land, Random Sea etc. for Random (Historical Civs). Choosing this option would mean that when the game chooses a map it would look at the civs the player/s have assigned and pick a random map where those civs have been tagged as appropriate. North American maps would have their native civs assigned to relevant areas, Asian maps the Asian civs, etc. Maps like Unknown would feature all civs. If the players also had “random personality” as their civ option the game would pick a map first and then choose civs from the list of appropriate civs for that map.
All it would require to implement would be a list of appropriate civs against each map in their metadata and a bit of extra logic in the random map choosing algorithm.
If it did get added it would become my new favourite game setting I’m sure