Build

Hawks Pico-5 Support Build

Build the mandatory Operator into an action-economy engine that hands an extra Action Point to whoever needs it most — and banks Bond progress every time it fires.

Theorycraft

Confidence: Strongly supported
Verified: 8 September 2026
Version: Pre-release evidence, plus retail launch-build observations (August 2026)

Build summary

Players who want the required story-mission slot to do something no other Operator can.

Campaign phase: early
Difficulty: Standard, permadeath enabled
Game version: Pre-release evidence, plus retail launch-build observations (August 2026)
Strong against: grouped enemies

This build has not been tested

Every mechanic cited below is confirmed and all of them exist in the retail build. The combination of them is our reasoning rather than anything played: this squad has not yet been tested by Zero Company Builds. It will be re-labelled when it has.

Loadout

The four bays

Weapon choices below are role-based. Damage and Action Point costs are in the database from launch-build reporting; accuracy is not, and no squad here has been tested end to end — so treat these as reasoned starting points rather than optimised picks.

Bay 1
Hawks
Medicpistol
Stacking support on the always-present Operator. If the Talent persists across Specializations as reported, the AP restoration is available regardless of this choice — the Medic Specialization simply adds Combat Stim to the same slot.
Bay 2
Custom Operator
Gunslingerpistol
The best AP recipient. An extra point on an Operator with cheap, repeatable attacks converts directly into another attack.
Bay 3
Custom Operator
Soldierrifle
Explosives and cover destruction — and a deliberate tension: the rocket spends the same Advantage that the AP restoration does.
Bay 4
Kabb Uppercut
Heavyrepeater
Frontline anchor with a displacement tool, so the squad has an answer to cover that does not require spending Advantage.

Reasoning

Why it works

Mechanic by mechanic. Anything stated as confirmed traces to a source listed at the bottom of this page.

The ability is called Pico-5. Advantage is spent to grant an ally an extra Action Point for the turn — the only known way to add AP to a turn — and it costs Hawks no Action Point of his own, so he can fire it after moving and attacking.
Each Operator has three AP. A fourth point on the right Operator is a 33% increase in that Operator's turn.
The extra point is worth the most where AP converts cleanly into output: another cheap attack, or the movement needed to reach high ground and still fire.
It also enables sequences that three points cannot fit — move, then attack, then go on Overwatch.
**Every use also pays 4 Bond Points between Hawks and the ally**, capped at 20 per character per mission. That is the half of this build nobody plans around, and it changes what the squad is for: five uses is the cap, and a completed Tactical Mission pays a pair 30, so a Hawks who spends his Advantage deliberately on one Operator is running a Bond farm alongside an action-economy engine. Bond ranks pay Focus Points to both of them.
That makes the target selection a two-variable decision rather than one. The best receiver this turn and the Operator you most want Hawks bonded to are often different, and the mission cap means the greedy answer is usually to spread the first five uses across the pair you are building rather than the Operator having the best turn.

Interactions

Synergies in this squad

Found by running these four Operators through the same engine the Squad Builder uses, so this page cannot claim a pairing the builder would not report.

Execution

Example opening turn

An AP and Advantage plan. Costs are unpublished, so the order matters more than the exact budget.

Step 1
Turn 1 — establish damage first: attack with the Gunslinger and Soldier to generate Advantage, since Advantage comes from damaging enemies.
Step 2
Turn 1 — assess what one more Action Point would buy: an extra attack, or a reposition that enables one.
Step 3
Turn 1 — Hawks: spend Advantage on Pico-5 to grant that Operator an extra AP. It costs him no Action Point, so it happens after his own turn rather than instead of it.
Step 4
Count the uses. Five on one ally is the 20-point Bond cap for that character; past it, the Action Point is still worth having and the relationship progress has stopped.
Step 5
Decide deliberately between Pico-5 and the Soldier's rocket — both draw on the same pool and both cannot happen in a lean turn.

Strengths

Puts the action-economy tool on the one Operator guaranteed to be in every story mission.
Flexible: the extra point goes wherever the turn needs it, rather than being locked to one plan.
Compounds with any per-attack effect, since an extra attack means another instance of that effect.
Pays Bond progress on every use, so the squad's tempo tool and its progression engine are the same button.
Requires no unlocks and works from the first mission.

Weaknesses

The Advantage cost rests on one previewer's pre-launch account of spending 3, and the retail guide that named the ability does not repeat a figure.
It competes directly with the Soldier's rocket and the Medic's Morale Boost for one shared pool of at most 10.
The Bond payout caps at 20 per character per mission — five uses — so the progression half of the build stops paying partway through a long fight.
Reported as once per turn, which would be a hard cap on the tempo half — this is not a scaling engine.
Its value depends entirely on AP costs, which are also unpublished.

Alternatives

Safer and more aggressive versions

Including what to do when an authored Operator in this squad is permanently lost.

Safer: Drop the Soldier for a second frontline Operator. The squad loses its rocket but stops competing for Advantage, making the AP restoration reliably available every turn.
More aggressive: Add a Scoundrel in place of the Heavy. The extra AP then feeds a critical-setup chain, at the cost of the squad's damage sink.
If Advantage runs dry: Call for Backup costs zero AP and helps build Bonds. It is the free action to lean on when the Advantage pool is committed elsewhere.

What still needs testing

Play this squad in the retail build, recording version, platform and difficulty, then update the status label from theorycraft to tested. Specifically: record Pico-5's Advantage cost in the retail build, confirm whether it is once per turn, and count Bond Points across a mission to check the 4-per-use figure and the 20-point cap.

Mechanics this build depends on

Other builds

Sources

Lead Zero Company To Victory on August 27
Electronic Arts · Tier 1 — Official · accessed 6 August 2026
Supports: Operator introductions; 3 Action Points per turn; Advantage caps at 10; the eight Specializations; Bonds in the Personnel Facility; Hawks' species options
Is Z-COM our new X-COM? Star Wars Zero Company gameplay deep dive
ChristopherOdd · Tier 3 — Hands-on preview · accessed 11 August 2026
Supports: 2:13–13:51 — Sweeping Salvo at 4 Advantage with three uses per mission; Hawks granting an ally 1 AP for 3 Advantage; Combat Recon granting 1 Advantage per unit scanned; the Grit Talent's stacking invulnerability; Heavy attacks taunting; the droideka ray shield; the Scout's Spotted status; Defense as flat damage reduction
Star Wars Zero Company: Ultimate Guide
Into Indie Games · Tier 3 — Retail review · accessed 8 September 2026
Supports: Bylined Mahmud Munazil Rahman, 27 August 2026. Registered for one mechanic and cited for nothing else. On Hawks' Pico-5, verbatim: it "provides another ally with 1 AP in exchange for Advantage Points"; it grants "+4 Bond Points to the bond between the two characters"; and "one can receive up to 20 Bond Points per each character per mission with this ability". **The Advantage cost is not given on this page** — the 3 this database holds comes from `preview-christopher-odd` and is not corroborated here.

Open this squad

Load these four bays into the builder to change them, check the warnings, and share your version.

Open in Squad Builder

Rubric

Scored 1–5 against pre-launch evidence. Each score shows its basis — no unexplained numbers.

Damage3/5

One extra Action Point per turn, converted into an extra attack. Real but bounded.

Control2/5

One displacement tool from the Uppercut; no other control.

Survivability3/5

A Medic and a Heavy, though the Medic's AP is often spent on support instead of healing.

Mobility4/5

The extra point is frequently best spent on repositioning, which is what makes this build flexible.

Ease of use3/5

Simple to execute, but requires judging every turn whether the AP or the rocket is the better use of Advantage.

Campaign value4/5

Built on the Operator who is present in every story mission, so the value never disappears.

Editor’s note

Updated 2026-09-08. The ability has a name — Pico-5 — and a second effect this build was written without: 4 Bond Points a use, capped at 20 per character per mission. That is a genuine addition to the argument rather than a relabel, because it makes target selection a progression decision as well as a tempo one, and it is the reason the build now names the Bonds mechanic among its related pages. One sentence was removed rather than reworded. This page said the attribution to Hawks was 'widely repeated but unsourced', which stopped being true on 2026-08-11 when a previewer used it as Hawks on camera, and is now doubly untrue. A caveat that outlives its reason is worse than no caveat. The status stays `theorycraft`. The ability is evidenced; building a squad around maximising it is still this site's argument, exactly as blueprint 3.2 labels it — and the Bond half of that argument is entirely untested.