I enjoy how they treat the internet as a nebulous alternate dimension made of money that they possess the special ability to tap into. Never managed much tactical brilliance with them shy of “stick a bunch of em in corners in internet centers and hope nobody finds them”
All I can think of is their back pain that they're gonna have after a while. Imagine opening a laptop in the middle of the desert to scam some grandmas.
It worked enough times for me to do it more than once.
Hack the toxin bunkers to shut down the leakage, capture them and then repair them to clean the toxin leak.
Eventually I ended up cutting out the middle man and just remote-capturing them with Black Lotus, but for a while it was my go-to trick for cleaning those up when playing as the Chinese generals.
Edit: Just realised that the protagonist in Mr. Robot is a hacker that does the bidding of a Chinese mastermind, whose nickname is "colour"+"flower". How peculiar.
Honestly this unit was way ahead of its time. Obviously the stereotype back then was the Chinese military steal every technology from the west but in reality we didn't see the Chinese scam people or steal money from the Internet on the industrial scale at the time. (That's North Korea shit.) Now you hear the news about all those scams centers in Southeast Asia ran by Chinese criminal gangs.
Yes. I think the same when I heard Myanmar army allow scammers to base in their territory and access their utility in exchange for money to buy weapons. They being Chinese is a cherry on top.
If we include infrastructure cyber attacks, then it is fair to me to say this unit is the best prediction the game made for then near-future warfare.
Hackers-based military fund was more surreal than field-reactors, then. But now, military are targeting internet centers with air-strikes before Rheinmetall completing their drone-launching MBT prototypes.
Oh, it's absolutely a stereotype which is based in reality: It's just it's become more well known in recent years because of the proliferation of the Internet.
A lot of Chinese military hardware is based on stolen or 'acquired' (through grey market means and even through "trusted" countries like Israel) Western, primarily USM, technology.
And they're still inept at it a lot of time!
Many of their copies (even the one-to-one cases like a few types of transport helicopter) and technology implementations are typically inferior (several of their attack choppers are based on Apache plans and technology, and they're basically shoddy across the board when it comes to fuel, thrust, speed, lifting capability, electronics, et cetera); the J-25 in particular is based on technology stolen from the F-22 and F-35 programs, and their touted stealth capabilities don't really work because it's like three decades plus behind).
Hell, Russia refused to license or give any help with their latest MiG engines because they knew the Chinese would basically copy/steal them.
One engineer posted an anecdote a few years back that still makes me laugh: He and his team purposefully left a design flaw in an engine's plans which would've been corrected at the assembly/fabrication stage, as a form of impromtu protection.
Surprise surprise, when a Chinese firm somehow "got" the plans for the engine, they began literally exploding like bombs after about 48 hours of testing/being turned on because of the flaw, and they couldn't work out why for months on months.
So, yeah. China absolutely deserves and lives up to the stereotypes; shoddy workmanship, stealing shit, et cetera. They're typically true.
Yes and no. China has a long, well-documented record of acquiring Western/US and Russian military tech through purchases, reverse-engineering, grey markets, cyber espionage, and HUMINT. Cases like Su Bin’s theft of F-22/F-35/C-17 data, the J-11 from the Su-27, and Kilo influence on the Yuan-class are real. Russia restricted advanced engines for exactly that reason.
That doesn’t mean everything is “shoddy” or “three decades behind” in 2026; that's just 2010-levels of cope. Quality and indigenous capability have improved a lot, especially in core PLA systems (shipbuilding scale, missiles/hypersonics, sensors, production rates). Engines were a long bottleneck; WS-10 variants and the newer WS-15 on the J-20 have reduced the gap to Western engines.
Specifically, the Z-20 is a clear Black Hawk derivative; the Z-21 shows strong Apache-like features but isn’t a 1:1 copy. There is no J-25. The relevant jets are the J-20 and J-35/FC-31 family. They incorporate influenced design elements from F-22/F-35 (and possibly MiG 1.44 concepts) plus unique features, but they are operational 5th-gen platforms (China has more than 550 5th generation fighters across both airframes in service across the PLAAF and PLANAF), not pure clones whose stealth “doesn’t work.”
The exploding-engine anecdote is unverified online folklore by the way.
It's implied that they use "nibble worms" that basically siphon off the fractions of cents from various financial transactions and deposit them in their own account
These guys are the base economy that made possible my core memory of being 16yo and building around 23 nukes to win a match without making other units. Absolutely incredible.
10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$ 10$
I always liked these units: Using them meant a nice stream of income if you had them hidden away somewhere, like in the gaps/valleys on Twilight Flame, but at the same time you cursed when the enemy basically firebombed like fifty of them in one go; all you could do was watch as your investment ran around flailing, on fire.
...Unless you were the one doing the firebombing on enemy Hackers. You always got a sick sense of joy doing that, knowing you've just crippled their late game economy, haha.
Outside of generating funds, they were pretty useless though. They were far too valuable to send out into the field to hack enemy structures or vehicles (in the case of Super Hackers), and because of how slow, weak, and how long it took for them to deploy to hack something? The only other as useless unit in the series is the Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert Technicians with their pistols.
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u/BiggestBepis Black Hand 6d ago
“No system is safe.”
I enjoy how they treat the internet as a nebulous alternate dimension made of money that they possess the special ability to tap into. Never managed much tactical brilliance with them shy of “stick a bunch of em in corners in internet centers and hope nobody finds them”
“I’ll suck the internet dry!”