With the next patch, we'll be adding these changes to the prison break mission which should address some of your concerns:
- The ability to tell the prisoner to stay or follow.
- The removal of polearms from the prison guards.
Well, if you know all the old ones by heart then walking around and visiting villages one by one is probably the best time waster

. You could compare the code in the settlements.xml (SandBox module) and/or custom_battle_scenes.xml (CustomBattle module for custom battles) between the old and the new version (via some online tool) to see which settlements on the campaign map had their scene file name changed and then visit them in-game.
Or you could have some CM noob check it out for you and paste the list below for 1.5.10 (1.6.0 didn't have any new ones). The new town and castle scenes were already specified in the patch notes.
- Lochana (empire_village_o)
- Epinosa (empire_village_m)
- Syratos (empire_village_k)
- Masangara (empire_village_z)
- Crios (empire_village_t)
- Nortanisa (empire_village_v)
- Elvania (empire_village_u)
- Gamardan (empire_village_s)
- Carphenion (empire_village_l)
- Leblenion (empire_village_y)
- Canoros (empire_village_r)
- Glavstrom (sturgia_village_d)
- Alebat (sturgia_village_c)
- Deir Hawa (aserai_village_d)
- Uqba (aserai_village_k)
- Abba (aserai_village_m)
- Hunab (aserai_village_g)
- Arromanc (vlandia_village_j)
- Ebereth (battania_village_m)
- Bog Beth (battania_village_g)
- Khimli (khuzait_village_e)
- Dinar (khuzait_village_d)
- Nutyuk (khuzait_village_f)
P.S. in the future we'll try to add these to the patch notes as well.