I meant all turn based games are slow paced by nature. Not your game alone. Even X-COM or Xenonauts or HOMM. If you make a quick analyzing all of these games actually have another game play loop on top of the tactical map part. That is because only playing tactical part over and over could bore the players faster. Don't get me wrong I am not saying why yours did not have it for a 1 month jam. Game is already pretty polished and was bug free.
For replication ability: If one player lost all his worms I would consider he lost the game. The possibility that you can't start over when you lost your main building and drones/villagers is both very accepted in the biggest 2 RTS games AoE2 and Starcraft 2. I am not saying I am 100% right. Every major and sometimes minor changes needs to be tested and could have adverse effects but you must accept sometimes we developers had to let go things in our games even if we don't want to.
I meant risk by getting played more and you have the right spirit. We do this jams because we want to do. That is the most important part.
Good idea, but we don't plan adding a campaign mode (maybe next game). This is a pure PvP game.
We made a meta-game before in another game, if interested, but that's a real-time one: https://igorsgames.itch.io/nectarpolis
Also I think what you say is more of a myth.
1) Turn-based tactics and puzzle games won Ludum Dare before
2) There are not many of them in jams not because of popularity, but because they are really hard to make
3) Just as with commercial indie games, the point is to get enough players in absolute numbers (to recoup budget or to get rated), not relative percents
4) Turn-based tactics are very very popular actually, in the form of card games :P