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11 STAR WARS Zero Company tracks the bonds between squad members through a system of Crew Relationships. The people in Zero Company are not a tidy unit. They hold different worldviews, carry their own grudges, and do not automatically trust one another or Hawks.
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33 Bonds
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55 Each pair of Operators has a Bond that measures how much they like or dislike each other. Bonds begin neutral or negative, and they grow when characters fight together, complete Operations and Tactical Missions, or use Call for Backup. When a Bond rises a level, both Operators can Cross Train for a permanent combat stat bonus, and reaching the maximum Bond level unlocks a special Cross Training passive ability. A well-bonded pair is more than the sum of its parts.
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77 Focus Points and the Focus Tree
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99 Bonds feed progression. Raising Bonds is the main way to earn Focus Points, which you spend in each Operator's Focus Tree to upgrade talents, abilities, and passives. You manage all of this at the Personnel station in the Den, where you can also review combat stats and change most Operators' Specializations.
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1111 Friction and Dilemmas
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1313 The flip side is conflict. Clashing personalities create friction you have to manage. At certain story points Hawks faces a Dilemma, an important decision on which every Operator weighs in, and the choice can raise or lower Bonds across the squad. Much of this plays out at the Den, where downtime conversations carry narrative consequences that ripple through the story.
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1515 People First
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1717 The relationship layer ties directly into permadeath. Because losing a companion is permanent, every bond you build is also something you can lose, which makes the social side of the game as fraught as the combat. Investing in a character deepens both their usefulness in a fight and the sting of leaving them behind.
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19+Cross Training
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21+Bonds are not only flavor. As Operators fight together they unlock support abilities for one another, and cross-training lets bonded units share new skills and stats. A pair who have run enough missions together end up more capable than the same two characters would be apart, which is a real argument for keeping a squad stable rather than rotating everyone through.
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23+Bonded units also feed one of the game's showier plays: calling for backup so that several of them fire on a single target in one action.
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25+What Bonds Do Not Do
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27+There are no romance systems and no branching story paths. Who you bring shifts individual scenes and moves bonds, but the campaign is linear from beginning to end and its conclusion is largely the same for every player.