Entities editing and loading them

Hi. I'll open by saying I've read every thread in the modding section but couldn't find the answer. Some of you have obviously figured this out though since I've played on servers with customised enemies and units.

My question is, how do I get the server to load my specific config files, or does it always load the entities .cfgs from Base\Entities?

I have copied the Entities folder from there into my specific Rules gamemode folder so that I can edit them separately, but I can't figure out if it's even possible to get them to load like that. Some of the .cfg files, like Rules\[gamemode]\gamemode.cfg reference the rules folder as the root so it's obvious there you need to change the [gamemode] part of path. But in that same file, the reference for the zombie director is a reference to the default one.

So are paths relative or absolute, and can they be changed? I've tried absolute and relative paths with both \ and / slashes inside most configs but I cannot get any edited entities (ie, different heart levels, different speeds, etc) to load on my server.

Help?