The chameleon is hands down the best animal. With it, you will never need to train agility or stamina, so you can focus your time and money on reaction and speed (the easy to train skills).
One important thing to remember is that you can press space to pause the game. While its paused, you can still move around, collect souls and toys, and build and sell towers. This makes the game a lot easier (almost too easy).
I loved the first Fantasy Kommander, and I think that this one is a vast improvement on the first. The larger armies that you are able to amass make the game a lot more interesting and make it so that losing a single unit isn't as devastating as it was in the first one.
As for the limited turns and the time it takes to knock out cities, these are things that you need to plan ahead on at the beginning of the level. You can't just randomly start killing people, you have to make very careful strategic decisions if you want to reach all of the objectives.
I like the game, but what I would like to see is instead of losing a soldier when you want to buy a new one, you have some sort of soldier inventory that allows you to switch them in and out whenever you want.
There's an easier way to do the last level than what's in the walkthrough. Add the first board to the board in the middle end to end so that it falls onto the bricks right above the box, then add the second board anywhere where it won't do any harm (like somewhere on the big circle), and finally add the third board so that it causes the two boards to fall off the edge and hit the box as it falls. it doesn't have to hit it to hard to work.
I'm really excited about the multiplayer. One of the problems that I had with the first one is that the AI would throw away 1,000's of dollars worth of units trying to defend a building that was right next to your base. It was too easy to stick a commando on a building, draw a bunch of fighters and tanks to the commando, then pick them off one by one.
What would be a challenge would be trying to beat it without taking any damage. The lowest I've gotten so far is winning it with only $22 of damage taken :)