@tuxella Thats true, when importing an existing GPX route from your phone and sent to the watch, no map is needed. You might be right with the connection to the server to store it also in the user account.
But for planning all map data needs an online connection to the servers who provide the data.
A possibility would be to just download the area you are in, but still storage on the phone would be necessary.
We have some topics for this issue or rather suggestion here in the forum for quite some time now, lets just hope this voice also be heard.