Squad Bonds & Relationships
The Heart of the Company
Operatives in STAR WARS Zero Company form bonds as they fight together — relationships between authored and player-created characters that deepen the story and unlock battlefield benefits.
They don't fight for the Republic. They fight for each other.
Previews have compared Zero Company less to a dry strategy game and more to Mass Effect with turn-based tactics — and the bonds system is why. Your operatives, both the authored characters and the operators you create yourself, form relationships as they fight side by side, and those relationships matter on the battlefield as much as in the story.
How bonds work
Deploy operatives together and their bonds deepen, unlocking new combat synergies, support abilities and cross-training benefits. The squad you run isn’t just a collection of stats; it’s a group of people whose shared history makes them measurably stronger. That gives a real mechanical reason to keep a consistent core rather than rotating in fresh recruits each mission.
Bonds and the cast
Because the system blends developer-authored characters — Hawks, Trick, Tel-Rea Vokoss, Cly Kullervo — with your own custom operators, your version of Zero Company is partly written by EA and partly by you. The Den’s downtime, crew conversations and recruitment all feed this web of relationships.
The cost of caring
Bonds also sharpen the game’s central tension. Because operatives can be lost to permadeath, every bond you build is something you can lose. That’s the deliberate emotional engine of the campaign: the better your squad knows each other, the more each deployment is worth — and the more it hurts when it goes wrong.