Autoplacement of units in battle is fine by me, if it puts tanks in the front.

It will be interesting to see if it deals properly with custom ranged units as well as the built in archers. I've learned that I can research Enchantment a lot faster than Archery and have designed custom ranged units using Ice staffs and Incineration staffs. These are fairly expensive to build so it's quite frustrating when they are placed front and center in tactical combat where they can sometimes be killed before I can move them to the rear

Well, that's something that we can report after the last beta update, if there are bugs with the new setup.  I will not say more about that now, because I have already said too much of nothing much in too many posts over the last few days.

I am also looking forward to the garrison troops having a better armor regime, hopefully that will be in 0.984.

The placement looks good but I would still prefer to be able to move units into the ranks.

Also, please have units start in auto-defence mode.

I agree.  Units should be defending even before they get their first turn.

I like unit customization (even though I sometimes just work with the prebuilt ones) and to some extent I like micro-management. But not everything needs to be micro-managed and sometimes the game just needs to progress. This autoplacement of units is a great compromise.