Thanks again for all the good responses. I'm finally getting back to this effort.
I was able to publish the streets and topo basemaps to our server using the cached tiles provided in the 2013 esri data and maps for server. This works. However, the scale do not give enough detail for what I am trying to do. I'm very close to getting this just right but can't seem to get over the hump.
I'm guessing I cannot adjust the scale and extent of those tiled basemaps that come ready to go from ESRI? I've tried but have yet to get that to work correctly. The service definition is provided with the map tiles and the scales are set in that setup file. Adjusting them seems to be problematic.
Basically I want to get the World Topo service that ArcGIS online has and create that same service on my server. It seems like such a simple exercise but I continue to struggle.
This is the service I want to replicate:
http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=30e5fe3149c34df1ba922e6f5bbf808f
Any ideas? We are using ArcGIS for Server 10.3 and Desktop 10.3. At this point, we are not using the portal.