Okay, I misremembered. You don't need networks (although networks are indeed what kills off the apprehensions and such), just the basic cult info which you get from any random cultist. This gives you safehouses, which provide you with the next level of cultists, Lads and Disciples and ninjas and everything.
This totally may not be how it works...
This totally is
not how it works. Missions are generated monthly, and added to the queue with
fixed spawn times. That's why 'the next mission starts is still the same', and also why your 'spamming the 1 day timer' means you're just repeating the
same sequence of events over and over, and drawing conclusions from it as if it was random sampling.
All this stuff about mission caps and whatever is just your pattern-seeking brain doing overtime.
And 4-5 missions every few days... If 'few' is even 5, that'd mean at least
a mission per day on average. I have
never seen this, at least not without the alien invasion going full swing and manors spawning missions on top). I just tested a new game and got 20 missions from
both December and January. This is not happening. Not in the first six months. You may be under the
impression that it is, but if you stop and actually count the missions, it's not.
As to mission completion rate, it's been a long-standing feature of the mod that you get spammed with somewhat repetitive missions, especially during the early game. And not doing them puts you behind the curve, sometimes fatally so. If you're experienced enough, I suppose you can pick your battles to a greater degree, but you still can't ignore most missions without already being relatively dominant.
Are they different graphically?
Of course. A Lad looks like this:
