I like the manual placement. It's a good option, although I'm hanging myself with it more often than not for the time being. Ugh!

I'd like to suggest a couple related features for simplification of placement :
1) If you have no troops to place or only one possible territory to place on, then ...

It's an awesome change! It makes the game context a lot easier to absorb for those of us with many games to keep track of.

-Cthulhu