Pick and choose random maps and gods in random map game?

Shkeephan, long time lurker, first time poster. Love this community and loved this game for the last 20 odd years!

I only recently started taking a real look at the game files. I wanted to customize what random maps will play, and I think I've done that. But I'd like to be able to choose and exclude what gods I might use when I select "Random" as my god/civilization choice. Suppose I want to play random maps and randomly have [Zeus, Hades, Ra, Isis, Thor, Loki, Gaia, Oranos] come up. I'm OK with enemy AI having any god, but for me I want to keep out Poseidon, Set, Odin, Kronos, and all Chinese. And maybe in the future I want to add or drop a god for myself, or for the AI.

First, to customize random maps, I took a look at the maps folder. There are three random-map selections you can make in-game: Random, Random All, and Random Land. They have three corresponding map files: fastrandom.set, randommaps.set, and randomland.set. I just copied the randommaps.set file, deleted a few of my not-so-favorite maps, changed the map ID in the XML header by increasing the ID number by 1, and saved it as custommaps.set. To my surprise, this works! A new panel appears in the maps select menu, under "Random Popular". By the way, no idea what's making the game able to easily distinguish and use a .set file vs a .xs and .xml file. But when I choose "Random Popular", it seems to be choosing only the maps I set in custommaps.set when I made it.

Now, how is a random god determined? It's totally different from maps! It seems like much of it must be wrapped up in the aomx.exe file itself, so therefore probably not really moddable. In the mod scripts, there's functions for getting the player ID, getting that player's civ and culture, and for setting the "Gaia" or general nature & wild animals god. But there's no function for setting a new god for a player. I looked around in the 'data' folder which mostly contains user interface stuff, in the 'rm2' folder for random maps which contains map info, and in the 'ai2' folder which contains scripts governing AI behavior. They all have code that's conditional and calls a given player's god/civilization, but nothing that sets it for a player.

I looked at the user profile file--that is, the '.prf' file in the 'Users' folder--which seems to be another XML file, where there's a number representing each player's god, among other values for each player. It's tagged 'civilization'. I tried sticking a little random number generator in there, but that just crashes the game. (I figured it wouldn't work but had to try.)

Does anyone know a good way to select a custom list of random gods? Is there a tweak to the god-selection menu, or some workaround that injects a random number generator in the right spot in the game's code, or something else?