The cloth map is a pretty cool idea. It looks cool, and is ok as a strategic zoom option for general navigation, but it needs a lot of work to really be playable on.
* Roads don’t show up on the cloth map(correction technically they are there on my screen just very faint and flicker? (maybe an issue with my graphics card? Gforce8800 GTS graphics card, latest drivers, 64bit win 7)
* each shrine should have its own symbol so you can tell which type it is, <correction the symbols should be distinct/intuitive>, color wouldn’t be a BAD thing say: white, black, yellow, green, red, blue, I assume you can figure out which shard types those correspond to w/o even knowing the symbol they would be attached to?
* hover popups should be available for towers and such that tell you who owns it ect. (less necessary if faction color and symbols is fixed)
* the build-in-progress cloth map symbols for various things are not very intuitive.
* chasm artwork needs to be re-done.
* water terrain work poorly for lakes, but well for oceans, probably just making the ripples more frequent would fix this.
* city name text works poorly when displayed over forests (tends to blend into the forest too much making it unreadable)
* it should probably do faction symbols next to city names and under watchTowers
* w/o cloth map cities display what they are building, how long and also what enchantments are active. With the cloth map you can get build info but you have to click on the city, a list of active enchantments I don’t think is available via the cloth map
*proportional unit scaling makes caravans disappear almost entirely- there should probably be a min size for some of these things.
*wild-lands(dead forests where nasty monsters like to hang out) and live forests are hard to tell apart
* Arcane monoliths should possibly have their own symbol so they can be told apart from regular watchtowers like on the regular map
Background: this is broken out of a super long post I did on my 1st impressions of the game, more will come to your delight or horror 
https://forums.elementalgame.com/425000