Field of Glory—where to start?

[hangarflying]

This is a miniature war game that covers the ancient and medieval periods. It uses a point-buy system to build armies from lists, and I think Army Builder would be a great tool for this game. Unfortunately, my lack of experience with both AB and FoG leaves me a bit stymied as to where I should start and how to organize everything.

1) Overall organization: the game has approximately a dozen supplement books that contain the army lists; each book contains about 20 or so factions with their own list. Initially, I was contemplating designating each faction as a race, but in the end, there would be over 200 races, and that seemed a bit much. Would it be possible to set each supplement book as the race, and then each faction in the book as a "sub-race"?

2) Filtering dates: a number of army lists have certain units that are available before a date and the other units after that date. Is there a way to set a filter that would allow me to provide a date range, and then only those options that fall within that range would be available?

2b) Date filter for overall organization: in lieu of paragraph 1, would it be possible to set a date filter that would give only those factions that fall within the range as options (along with the appropriate date-related army options)?

3) Unit stats: I made a definition file and got it to compile, though I don't think I understand how everything works. Units in FoG don't have numerical stats (Att 5, Def 3, HP 10, etc), rather the stats are terms (heavy foot, armored, drilled, pikeman, for example). I made tag groups of each category, and then tags of each term for the categories, but I'm not sure how to associate them to a unit.

I started filling out a data file for a test unit, and the categories showed up in the "stats" section, but the stats aren't numbers...do I just type in the appropriate I'd?

3b) Some units have multiple attack styles. For example, unit a is a swordsman, unit b is impact foot, and unit c is both swordsman and impact foot. Is there a way for unit c to recognize both "swordsman" and "impact foot", or do I need to make a third entry for "swordsman, impact foot"?

I may be getting ahead of myself on some of this. Thanks for any help!