I haven't played W.M.D., but from what I've seen from the streams, pacing definitely feels different. The delays are a part of it, and they do subjectively seem less forced in Armageddon. For another thing, W.M.D. introduces crafting, giving players at least something to do between turns - in Armageddon you've nothing to do but follow the action and mock your opponents' mistakes :D
There is a spicy game mode in Armageddon called Paranoia (https://worms2d.info/Paranoia), in which these delays, plus the turn duration, are all set to zero, meaning players have exactly one frame to make their move. As you can imagine it is very hectic!
Though I imagine games are rather quick like that
That’s just how Worms was originally (eg the DOS game) because that’s how turn based games were originally paced. A large part of that will obviously be due to the capabilities of systems back in the day but it was also that a lot of games weren’t so fast paced as they are now.
You see a similar thing with beat em ups too. Take Street Fighter 2 on the SNES then look at Capcom games on every console each generation after and there is a noticeable difference in how the pace increases with each new release. Same is true for a lot of other genres too.
Slightly offtopic: I haven't played Armageddon for a long time, but I assume the pace of Worms Armageddon is similar to Worms W.M.D. (which I'm playing on Switch), and it seems like there is a lot of waiting involved - just a few seconds here and there, but overall, it feels like the game could move at a much faster pace, especially when playing single player.
Do you know if this is a conscious decision (e.g. to keep people from burning through the available content through fast) or due to technical limitations (e.g. the AI actually has to think), or just happens to be that way?
A few seconds before the damage count shows up, a few seconds before the next enemy worm gets selected, the five-second countdown before the bot worm starts moving, a few seconds after the turn ends, a few seconds between the "machine gun destroyed" and the explosion etc. - would it be possible to add a "faster" mode? (Sorry if Armageddon has that, as I said, it's been a while.)
(For W.M.D. on the Switch, the long loading screens add to the waiting, but those sound a lot harder to avoid than the in-game delays.)