Hello Mike.
Looking back over your post history it seems you have been chasing these same guiding questions over several separate posts for some time but never resolving them?
In MaxIm, guide settings, Auto scope dec, Auto pier flip and Pier flip should all be disabled when using ACP, you only activate these settings if necessary with particular mounts when using MaxIm as standalone in conjunction with MaxIm's Observatory Control module.
Declination Compensation in ACP guide setup is useful in some circumstances.
If you have a good quality mount that includes permanent PEC then with declination compensation enabled you may find the mount suffers RA oscillation when pointing to targets close to the pole in poor seeing conditions as the mount starts chasing the seeing and overcorrecting.
For a poor quality mount with significant uncorrected periodic error then declination compensation may improve guiding when the target is close to the pole but there is no hard and fast rule here as there are so many variables at play.
Note though that the function of declination compensation is not consistent across the different guide modes in MaxIm and for ASCOM direct guiding with mounts such as a Paramount for example the guide correction signal from MaxIm to the mount is sent as a defined arc-second mini-slew, for want of a better term, and declination compensation is irrelevant in this mode but when using on-camera guide relays and a cable from the ST4 guide port on a camera to the ST4 guide port on the mount then the guide signal is sent as a variable time duration pulse. When using the on-camera relays method in MaxIm then declination compensation is relevant and has a big effect approaching the pole.
It is really important to experiment with the various guide settings in MaxIm alone before integrating with ACP, IOW, MaxIm must be able to produce excellent guiding at all DEC angles before handing over control to ACP and with MaxIm it is my experience that you may need to spend a couple of nights on this to fine tune the settings.
For my own Paramount MX I found that guiding on targets close to the pole suffer from RA oscillation if DEC compensation is enabled in ACP and for my mount/OTA combination guiding is optimal when DEC compensation is disabled in ACP.
Your experiments should reveal which is best for your setup.
If you have not already read it, there is a document by Jim McMillan included with ACP Help that explains the intricacies of setting up auto guiding, you will find a shortcut to Jim's document in the "Auto Guiding Your Mount" tab of ACP's built-in help library.
William.