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Zero Company cover and flanking explained

Partial and full cover reduce the chance of being hit. Flanking around cover and taking high ground both improve your hit chance. Some cover is destructible, which means explosives can remove an enemy's protection outright rather than going around it.

Confirmed
Confidence
Confirmed
Verified
4 August 2026

Three ways to beat cover

Cover is the main defensive system, and there are three confirmed answers to it. You can go around it by flanking. You can shoot over it from high ground. Or you can remove it — some cover is destructible, and the Soldier's explosives and rocket exist partly for that reason.

A fourth answer is displacement: Force Push and Uppercut move the enemy out of cover instead of dealing with the cover itself.

It applies to you too

Destroying cover is not free. Cover your squad wanted to use next turn is gone once it is destroyed, and an advancing Operator that has stripped the battlefield of cover has nowhere to advance to.

The Assault's official role is attacking enemies in cover, and the Heavy's is absorbing attacks while standing in the open. Those two roles exist because standing in the open is otherwise a bad idea.

Confirmed

The rules as officially stated

  • Partial and full cover reduce hit chance.
  • Flanking improves hit chance.
  • High ground improves hit chance.
  • Some cover is destructible.

Planning

What this means for squad building

  • Tag builds as mobile, anti-cover, high-ground or displacement so a squad can be checked for at least one answer to entrenched enemies.
  • A squad with strong ranged damage and no anti-cover tools will stall against defended positions.
  • Destroying cover changes the map for both sides — plan the follow-up position before firing.

Open questions

Points the shipped game has not yet answered for us, or that need a controlled comparison to state as fact — recorded rather than guessed at.

  • The exact hit-chance modifiers for partial cover, full cover, flanking and high ground.
  • Which cover types are destructible.
  • Whether destroyed cover leaves rubble that still provides partial cover.
  • Whether flanking has an angle threshold.

Questions

Common questions

The way these come up in search, answered directly.

Does high ground improve your hit chance?
Yes. Taking high ground improves hit chance.
Is cover destructible in Zero Company?
Some of it is.
Can a 100% shot miss in Zero Company?
Not since Patch 1.1, released 9 September 2026. Before that it could, and EA list it as a bug they have fixed.

Every question, answered with its sources

Related mechanics

Sources