So, this was not the best communication attempt ever...
When we initially set out to explain the situation with the Stamen map layers going away, we referred to them as satellite imagery. This was a mistake, and created a lot of unnecessary confusion and anguish among some users.
So let's try this again.
As we wrote on that piece, we were forced in a hurry to drop support for three map layers externally provided by the kind people at Stamen Maps: "Stamen Terrain" (a topography layer, see sample)
"Stamen Roads and Cities" (a variant of Terrain optimized for displaying road & urban networks) and "Stamen Labels" (a layer dedicated to displaying placenames). These layers are moving to a paid-access system from Oct 31.
As part of our pre-release coverage of CMO, we presented the various map layers included in Command in this article. With the exception of the Stamen layers, all of these layers still remain available as always.
In addition:
1) Beginning with the upcoming v1.06 / Build 1328.11 update, we are restoring the placenames layer. Stamen have kindly provided a very liberal usage license on their map tiles, so we can re-host the placename tiles on our own servers and provide them on-demand to CMO users. So this useful to many map layer is coming back, free of hosting concerns.
To pre-empt the reasonable question of "Why aren't you doing the same with the other two layers": We use only up to the level-10 zoom on placenames, which keeps the number and size of the fileset at fairly small levels. The other two layers go all the way to level-17 zoom, and at that scale the file numbers and sizes are GIGANTIC. Let alone the challenges of hosting such a set; we cannot obtain it from Stamen in the first place.
2) Serendipitously, we recently added support for the third-party OpenTopoMap layer in Command. This is an excellent map set offering both topography and road+urban network data, thus easily rivalling the functionality offered by the retired Stamen layers.
Thus, at the end of the day users of Command still have an excellent, high detail topography layer at their disposal. And as previously noted, all the other existing layers are offered directly by MatrixGames and are not going anywhere.
At the same time, this turn of events has motivated us to start exploring additional map layers & services out there which may be of good value to users of CMO and CPE. We are evaluating some possible candidates but we are also open to suggestions from the user community.
We hope this clarification eases the legitimate concerns of many players caused by our initial announcement.