I'm going to try that now, although with my level of knowledge I don't think I'm going to succeed. But yeah this does seem like ACMOS is screwing with the LODs.
All right this is definitely an issue with ACMOS. It doesn't matter what LODs we generate, which files we use, or what value we set. ACMOS just doesn't let Vigilant worldspaces have the proper map. I tried to do it with Map object LOD set to 16, with only Vigilant's LOD files being active, and yet nothing showed up in the map.
Btw though, how does one go about opening the .LOD files included in some mods. IIRC those are the ones that contains the LOD rules for said mod, aren't they?