As you mentioned, small map size may be better with operations search.
I am not sure if there will be test cases with small map size?
If yes, then we may need to implement an operations search algorithm, along with RL algorithm.
My question is: will you limit the minimal map size? For example, larger than K x K, ensuring that most operations search algorithm can not solve the problem in time limit. So that we can focus more on real large map size.