SH3 Commander and other q's

[Agrippa]

I just installed SH3 Commander and basically I want to know, should I assign medals and promotions from the usual in-game screen, or do I do that from SH3 Commander. Commander is supposed to be more realistic, so I was wondering if that's where I'd assign rewards, or has the mod rewritten the game file that decides how many promotions/medals are assigned?

Also, in the Subsim download page are a couple of files from CaptainAmerica, and these are .7z type files. How exactly do I install these mods? are they just files I overwrite in some directory, or do I need a program to extract the files first?

I apologize if these seem like stupid questions, they seem so to me, but I'd rather get answers before doing something wrong.