What happens if your turn is skipped at the Initial Territory Selection phase or the Initial Unit Placement phase if they are Sim or Turn Based? Does everything get randomly assigned/distributed?

In both cases a random selection / placement occurs (or all placements / selections if it's simultaneous play).

Is there any downside to having the random placement happen every time?

That way players would not be so severely penalized for being skipped, but they also wouldn't get much of an advantage because the troops would get more or less randomly tossed around.

Well it just means that if a player has deserted the site then each of their turns will take the max turn limit which could be very frustrating for the other players.

We still keep the once skipped, next time booted rule though.

If the coding is in place to randomly assign then randomly assigning them on the first skip seems like a nice middle ground between keeping them in reserve and throwing them away.

Here's a random Haiku:

Pondering appeal,
sipping summer orange ale
in a foreign jail.

Was there any resolution from this thread?  I'm in a game now where someone's turn was skipped because he didn't play in time, which in the past I had always thought/assumed included the entire turn including the armies...  and yet he suddenly got to place double the armies.  I guess I was blind-sided by this, because it seems there should be a penalty for skipping a turn this way in order to dissuade people from wasting time in this manner in the future.  Thoughts?

depends on the game board, look into the rules/options to see if reserves are turned on. if they are allowed, then a turn can be skipped either intentionally or unintentionally and units kept. if they are not allowed then there's a bug.

Can you give me a link to the game and I'll take a look.

Here's the game link:  http://www.wargear.net/games/view/196115

It looks like there is unlimited reserves in the game... I guess I should've read the rules more closely, I didn't realize there was a difference in the way skipped turns are implemented.  Thanks!