Bridge Over Troubled Water

I'm considering a major change in the overall game architecture: so far the plan was to rely on world machine to achieve beautiful visuals, but I'm seriously thinking to drop it, as it's not scalable at all, in fact I would have to set up a centralized server that should contain hundreds of thousands of images, to be used by clients dynamically. Since I'm not google I can't affort to set up this system, so I must trade the beautiful maps that I could create with wm for a more workable solution. It's not a tragedy, I must be ready to these major changes.
So now everything changes, because with wm my concern was to set up all the small individual tiles that provided the land textures, the heightmaps, and also the terrain code types to the game client. Without these I have to rely to 3d shapes, which can be very quickly referenced between client and server, but I must also provide a decent way to texture those shapes. For sure the maps will be crappier than planned.