Agree

The only thing I notice now while walking through the forest is the lack of monster scenery. 

Yep. I reported this during beta as well.

I play almost the entire game with the cloth map. It is the only way to be aware of what is going on in your empire. (Most other games warn you when an enemy is spotted in your territory.)

"Please fix the optimum path algorithm Stardock. Equally bad things happen around settlements where my troops will often walk multiple squares in the open beside the city when they could just step into the city and step out the otherside for way less movement."

I thought that it would be easy to have my armies take a shortcut through cities, but that seems to eat all of my movement points.  Does anyone know if there is a movement penalty for going through a city?  It seems like when I enter a city it either takes all the remaining points or triggers an 'end turn' which can be irritating when I'm not expecting it.

If it's triggering an 'end turn' turn off the 'auto end turn' thing in the options.  In my experience entering a city costs 1 movement and then costs nothing when you leave the city.  So it should indeed act as a shortcut I often use long cities to travel 6+ squares in a single turn.

Entering a city costs the same movement point as any other move off the terrain you started on.  Exiting a city costs nothing as long as you exit to a square directly outside the city.  I think there might be a bug with the movement if you right click more than one square away from the city.  As I am exiting the city  I think I am using more movement points under that one condition, but I never tested it.

agree that my guys are going into the forest more than they should.  I once campaigned for a movement trail like they do in HOMM.  wouldn't that be nice?

I talked about it in Alpha Beta too but...nothing. That reminds me of that motto we had while I was an instructor in the military:

"You talk to them, they don't listen.

If they listen, they don't understand.

If they understand, they just don't care!"

With Elemental you have to imagine each city tile as quantumly magnified relative to the rest of the map.

Obviously the distance covered by one map tile is farther than walking across a city marketplace. This is where you imagine that your city is small but appears larger to attain the medieval cartographic aesthetic. It doesn't significantly nerf any strategy I have unless I choose to snake my cities for the benefit of warping the strategic map. I don't.