Build

Force Push & Overwatch Squad Build

Stop waiting for enemies to walk into your reaction cone — push them into it.

Confirmed

Confidence: Confirmed
Verified: 14 September 2026
Version: Retail 1.1, 9 September 2026 — official patch notes

Build summary

Players who want to control when reaction shots happen instead of hoping the enemy cooperates.

Campaign phase: early
Difficulty: Standard, permadeath enabled
Game version: Retail 1.1, 9 September 2026 — official patch notes
Strong against: entrenched enemies, advancing enemies

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
Tel-Rea Vokoss
Jedi Padawanpistol
Force Push pushes enemies and can remove them from cover. She arrives on the Jedi Padawan class, which is fixed — there is no Assault build of her to reach for, so the reaching is done by the class's own mobility.
Bay 2
Kabb Uppercut
Heavyrepeater
The second confirmed displacement tool. Two push effects mean the plan survives one of them being out of position — or one Operator being permanently lost.
Bay 3
Custom Operator
Sharpshooterlongarm
The reaction cone. A ranged Operator holding Overwatch is what turns a push into damage.
Bay 4
Hawks
Scoutrifle
Required in story missions. His AP support is what lets an Operator move and still have the points to invest in Overwatch — the single tightest AP constraint in this squad.

Reasoning

Why it works

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

Overwatch is a directional cone that triggers when enemies move or act — confirmed.
Force Push pushes enemies and can remove them from cover, and Uppercut knocks an enemy out of cover — both confirmed.
Moving an enemy is 'moving', which is what a reaction cone triggers on. Displacement therefore converts Overwatch from a passive bet into a turn you can plan.
The same push does double duty: it strips the cover bonus that reduces hit chance, and it delivers the target to the cone.
More AP invested can increase the number of reaction shots, so an Operator that has not moved gets a stronger cone.

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 — Sharpshooter: set Overwatch first, before spending AP on anything else, so the maximum number of points goes into the cone. This ends that Operator's turn.
Step 2
Turn 1 — Hawks: reposition, and hold Advantage in reserve rather than spending it.
Step 3
Turn 1 — Tel-Rea Vokoss: move into range and Force Push a target out of cover and into the cone's arc.
Step 4
Turn 1 — Kabb Uppercut: use Uppercut on a second target if one is in reach, or hold the frontline.
Step 5
Between turns: the pushed enemies trigger the reaction shots.

Strengths

Every mechanic in the chain is officially confirmed — only the combination is untested.
Acts on the enemy's turn as well as your own, effectively increasing the squad's action count.
Displacement doubles as anti-cover, solving two problems with one ability.
Two independent push sources give redundancy against permadeath.

Weaknesses

Using Overwatch ends the Operator's turn, so the squad gives up damage now for damage later.
The cone's angle and range are unpublished, so how precisely a push must be aimed is unknown.
Heavily reliant on stationary positioning, which is poor on timed objectives.
Both displacement sources are authored Operators — permadeath on both removes the build's core.
The trigger is not yet a guarantee. PC Gamer report Overwatch sometimes failing to fire on enemies moving through its cone after Patch 1.1, and EA's notes fix only shots that should not have happened. A push that lands the target in the cone is still the right play; a turn with no second cone and no shot in hand for the one that walks through unshot is the risk.

Alternatives

Safer and more aggressive versions

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

Safer: Replace Kabb Uppercut with a Medic. You drop to one displacement source but gain the Injury prevention that a stationary squad taking return fire actually needs.
More aggressive: Replace Hawks-as-Scout with a Soldier build. Explosives remove cover outright instead of pushing enemies out of it — though this is only possible in skirmish missions, since Hawks is required for story missions.
If both displacement Operators are lost: Concussion Grenades are officially named as a Utility, but no source confirms they displace. Do not plan around it until confirmed.

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: confirm that an enemy moved by Force Push or Uppercut actually triggers an Overwatch cone, and record the cone's angle and range.

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
Star Wars Zero Company: How Some of the Greatest Minds in Tactics Games are Pushing the Genre, Again
Xbox Wire · Tier 2 — Developer interview · accessed 6 August 2026
Supports: Greg Foertsch and James Brawley on the eight Specializations, Combat Stim + Gunslinger synergy, Advantage, and Specialization changes on authored characters
STAR WARS Zero Company — Patch 1.1 Notes
Electronic Arts · Tier 1 — Official · accessed 14 September 2026
Supports: Published 9 September 2026, the first post-launch patch; re-read in full on 14 September 2026, when it was still the newest entry on EA's News & Updates page. **Every item below is listed by EA under bug fixes**, which is what makes each one a statement about 1.0 as well as about 1.1. Secondary Specializations: their passive Cross Trainings "now correctly enter the selection pool at Relationship +8", and Secondary Specializations "now count for Specialization-specific Operation requirements and results". Chance-to-Hit: attacks displayed at 100% "can no longer erroneously miss". Scattergun: Tiers II, III and IV "no longer incorrectly use Tier I values". Droid Dismantler: Harmony "is granted only on Droid deaths, not on every enemy death". Tel-Rea: the Ranged Damage Cross Training bonus "is now applied once rather than twice" to her Force attacks, and Critical Damage bonuses "now correctly apply" to them. DC-17m Anti-Armor: it "can now critically hit" and "receives damage bonuses that apply to grenades". Ion Blasters "no longer double Critical Damage". Sweeping Salvo: "enemies outside the targeting cone are no longer hit". A Life of Labor II "can no longer infinitely accumulate bonuses when purchased repeatedly". Immovable: the status "now provides its intended bonuses". Bacta Tank, missed on the first read and added 14 September: "Fixed an issue where the Bacta Tank could be used more than one in a cycle" — EA's wording, typo included; the intended rule is one use per cycle. Overwatch, three lines, quoted verbatim on 14 September because the first pass had paraphrased the first of them too loosely: "Fixed an issue where Overwatch shots triggered against attackers caused the enemies to fire through solid objects at Operators they couldn't see" — an enemy-side line-of-sight failure, not the player's reaction shots passing through walls; "Fixed some instances of Overwatch triggering on a unit outside of the targeting cone"; and "Fixed various Overwatch issues that caused enemies and Operators to be unintentionally attacked". A fourth mentions it in passing: "Fixed a turn ordering issue that caused the Coil Captain to heal a target already slain by Overwatch". **Checked for and absent**: any figure for anything — no Scattergun tier statistics, no Harmony amount, no DC-17m damage, no figure for what Immovable now provides, no Bacta Tank cost. Also absent: any fix for Overwatch *failing* to trigger. Every Overwatch line corrects a shot that should not have happened, and none claims a shot that should have happened now does.
Star Wars Zero Company gets much-needed first patch so you won't miss shots with a 100% chance to hit any more
PC Gamer · Tier 3 — Retail review · accessed 14 September 2026
Supports: Registered for one claim, and it is the one no patch note can make about itself: what the patch did *not* fix. The outlet's own playthrough had Overwatch failing to fire — in the passage as it surfaced through search, the main bug experienced was Overwatch not triggering even when enemies jog through multiple targeting cones on their turn, and that does not seem to have been addressed, although the bugs where Overwatch triggered on units outside the cone or behind solid objects have. The article body could not be retrieved by this site — pcgamer.com returns a membership interstitial to an automated fetch, as it did for `retail-pcgamer-talents` — so the byline and the exact build tested are unrecorded, and the claim is filed as one outlet's account rather than corroborated. It is consistent with EA's notes, which fix only shots that should not have happened, and it is why every Overwatch record here carries a reliability caveat rather than reading the patch as a guarantee. **Checked for and absent**: any statement of how often the failure occurs, any reproduction steps, and any acknowledgement from EA.

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

Reaction shots add attacks outside your own turn, but each is likely smaller than a committed attack.

Control5/5

Two confirmed displacement tools plus reaction fire — the most control available from confirmed mechanics.

Survivability2/5

A Heavy in the squad, but no healing and no Injury prevention.

Mobility2/5

Overwatch rewards standing still, which conflicts directly with advancing.

Ease of use2/5

Requires correct cone placement, then a push aimed into it, in the right order, in one turn.

Campaign value3/5

Strong where enemies must cross open ground; weak where the squad must advance under time pressure.

Editor’s note

Updated 2026-09-14. Nothing in the composition changes. Patch 1.1 enforces the cone — the pushed enemy has to land inside it, which is what this build always assumed — and one outlet reports the cone sometimes not firing even then. The second point is the new weakness, worded as an execution risk rather than a mechanical one, because the design EA describe is unchanged and the report is single-source. The interaction is described as a confirmed synergy in blueprint 3.2, but no source states that a pushed enemy triggers Overwatch. Verification wording reflects that.