Light of Altair (LoA) is a sci-fi colony building game released in June 2009 by SaintXi Game Studios[www.saintxi.com].

Grow colonies from landing pod to metropolis, while sending off new spaceships to expand your territory to other worlds & defend against your enemies. Campaign is split across 16 missions mixing scripted events with real-time colony managment (with pause), offering variety in gameplay. Regrettably, there is no dedicated sandbox mode to explore in LoA.

For the seasoned strategy player, LoA may not have complex unit management or other relatively difficult strategies to master, but there are some key things that will help you understand & excel (& off course enjoy) this game.

This guide assumes you already have played the game to some degree and are perhaps needing some extra help to progress through the campaign or understanding the game mechanics. If you need more basic information to get you started on LoA, I would recommend reading the Official LoA Manual (see Supplimental Info section for details) and off course why not just giving it a go!

On to the guide...

How to keep on top of things.

Each mission will have multiple different goals to achieve (normally a dozen or more!), that will keep you on your toes ... constantly mixing the gameplay up. Some of these are hidden & some will only open as you progress. As you move forward through the goals, they will trigger notifications along the right hand side of the screen. Make sure you always read these!

Don't feel rushed if multiple notifications pop up. Time will pause when you are reading text notifications & remember you can always pause at any time & regroup, or navigate the UI.

Try to action your new goals as soon as possible. Some are on timers & failing goals will reduce your overall score or even fail the mission completely.

Make sure you keep notifications area cleared! Notifications will pile up quickly on the right hand side of your screen & if you get too many you will not see new ones arrive. You can clear them individually by pressing your right mouse button over the icon once you have read it. Important ones sometimes cannot be deleted till the goal is successfully completed or time has elapsed, but regardless if it is flagged as important you should keep this handy if you want to win.

As you progress with your colonies, new buildings will become available that upgrade existing buildings. You can upgrade over the top of an existing 'similar' building without selling first. This will give you a full refund of the purchase price rather than the reduced amount.

I completely missed this in the UI for the first 5-6hrs I was playing, so just to point it out, learn to use your Star Map (as pictured) for navigating between planets/asteroids.

It will save you a lot of time to learn the layout each mission over navigating in 3D. Often other planets will be in the way and you have to change camera angles and zoom just to select it.

Once selected, you should be able to zoom in with your scroll wheel (do what you need to do) then can zoom out and navigate back to the star map to find your next location.

Much quicker!



Please also be aware it is possible in rare occasions to break the missions progression. New objectives will not arrive as you are unable to finish the last one. If this happens to you, the only option is to restart the mission. :(

How much money you make is tied closely to your colonies happiness. This means the larger you grow your colonies the more you can tax; but the larger they grow the unhappier they become; which in-turn can reduce your income.

Having your citizens happier will also increase your growth rate.

This 'balancing act' between expansion/spending & your citizens' happiness is the key understanding to keeping economic prosperity positive .... & the money rolling in! :)

What Influences your Citizens in LoA?

In order to understand how to build a colony, you firstly need to understand what impacts your citizens' happiness. This will drive what you build and when, and also be vital to income generation and ultimate success!

Your colonies' growth will fuel discontent among the citizens resulting in unhappiness.

So what can you do to increase their happiness as you grow bigger?

The Morale of Your Citizens:

What makes your citizens UNHAPPY:

It feels like most things cause unhappiness when you play, but the key triggers include:

Each Tier (beyond Tier 2) will increase the unhappiness. Each Tier you will need to go to greater measures to satisfy your citizens.

This includes your Power Stations, Orbital Receivers, Mines & Fuel Synth Stations, Shipyards, Industrial Centres, Goods Factories & Hyperspace Gate Stabiliser.

** These are off course your most productive buildings & are required to grow a strong economy. **

You will inevitably loose one of the planets in your control to a hostile. If you reclaim control of the planet with a counter attack often there is structural damage. You can loose some of your key colonies and have to rebuild your infrastructure.

Pause & check everytime you reclaim a planet or moon to ensure all colonies are still there and where buildings have been destroyed build them again ASAP to regain your happiness.

What makes your citizens HAPPY:

All is not lost; there are ways to keep your growing colonies happy & keep the money rolling in for expansion.

Tier 1 requires a Tier 2 colony, Tier 2 requires a Tier 3 colony and Tier 3 requires a City or larger.

Their effects reduce as your population increases so more Colonial Quarters are inevitably needed and lower tiers upgraded. In a full developed primary colony you could have 10 or so keeping everyone happy.

A building in one colony does not negatively impact a neighboring colony. Use this to your advantage to minimise unhappiness issues across your wider colonies.

Increases trade / happiness.



The following buildings have no negative (or positive) impact on happiness; including the Landing Area, Starport, Solar Array, Log-G Research Facility, Atmospheric Generator & Convertor, and the Shield Generator.

Key Considerations:

Consider all your colonies together as a linked ecosystem. Not only will they trade and share extra food with the primary colony, but the happiness of the primary colony also influences the secondary colonies happiness. This has several impacts.

Firstly, by keeping the primary colony with high happiness (75-100%) you other colonies on the planet will also be happy (just to a lesser degree). Increasing happiness in your primary colony is also the only way to increase happiness in Basic/Tier 1 colonies too which can be add further benefit to keeping the primary colony happiness high.

Secondly, you can concentrate 'unhappy' buildings into the primary colony which would mean you can build less 'happy' buildings across the planet/asteroid focusing them in your primary colony (in turn making all colonies happier). You secondary colonies then become more farming/mining locations with many of the key buildings in the primary 'city' colony zone. More food plus high happiness will result in faster growth and higher populations.


Keeping all your citizens happy across all colonies will increase your revenue generated through tax. Happier they are the more tax you will generate.

Make sure you address any unhappiness ASAP!

Overspending will reduce the happiness across all your colonies on all planets/asteroids. This will reduce your revenue till you are back in the black (this can take a long time!) and the longer it is the worse it gets. The bail out money may seem like a good idea at the time but will slow you down in the long run. Don't spend what you don't have.

Colony Evolution:

There are 5 Tiers of expansion (total of 6 Tiers) for your colonies. Depending on what you build within the zone of the colony, what available resources you have & the overall happiness of your citizens will determine how fast your colony will grow.

Your fledgling starting colony. Cannot generate any taxes, so early development should be geared to population growth.

Reaching this tier will allow your colony to trade with other colonies. Start preparing required resources for expansion to new colony (where space is available).

You now have an established & productive colony. Time to start spreading out with new colonies, to secure new resources & increase trade opportunities.

You can now generate taxes. Keep citizens happy as your population continues to grow. Your borders will expand +1 allowing further development.


Taxes increase.


Further Tax increase.



Each tier will progressively take longer to achieve, with Basic to Tier 2 being relatively quick but later progression past Tier 3 into the Cities take a much longer time as the population cap is much higher.

Colony Location & Expansion:

Most missions will start with you expanding to new locations as the campaign progresses. This will require you to locate a planet or moon and find a suitable location for your first colony.

For my first primary colony on any planet or moon, I always try to find a place that has the maximum tile space to expand. This will come in handy for your primary colony as you grow bigger. So avoid deep canyon veins, island locations or other cramped spaces (such as between other colonies).

Give yourself space to expand on subsequent colonies. Once you hit Tier 3, your colony will expand out 1 tile (where it has vacant & viable space to do so). When you are planning the location of your second, third, forth... colonies try to give a 2 tile space gap (assuming both are under Tier 3). This will allow both colonies to grow out further by 1 tile when they reach Tier 3.

Not all locations will give you the option to space things perfectly so some compromise is generally needed, but do give priority to your primary colony where possible.

Colony Building:

Now you have landed and your first primary colony is established, you will need to start building up your population & provide the required facilities for growth. You will also want to expand to surrounding areas as soon as possible and lay claim, providing resources as a trading partner to your primary colony.

Every new colony will require the basic needs of food & power, and once grown can house other specialist buildings.



Build 2-3 Hydroponics facilities & Solar Arrays (more as needed). Let your colony grow to Tier 1. Once you have grown to Tier 1, you can increase your food and power further and build any mines present in the area.

Also remember to build a Log-G Research Facility & Starport on each planet/asteriod. Technically, only one Log-G Research Facility is needed in total, but it is good to have some redundancy.

Upgrade & replace any Solar Arrays with Power Station(s). If it is your primary colony begin to construct your industry buildings like Industrial Centre, Ship Yard & Orbital Reciever. Counter any unhappiness by building Colonial Quarters, ensuring your primary colony has good happiness (>75%).

Continue to increase food output where space allows in all secondary colonies. From Tier 2 it is also a good time to look outwards to expand to a new colonies on your borders (or planets afar) and start building again. Tier 3, your colony borders will expand one hex providing more room for new buildings. Will need to construct an Atmospheric Generator in a hostile or absent atmosphere to progress the colony to a City.

By the time you get to this tier on your colony, all available real estate is taken. Most of your changes now will be upgrades to existing structures and swapping some out as needed to balance the colony requirements. You will also likely need to build specialty buildings at this level such as the Government Building, Hyperspace Gate Stabiliser or Atmospheric Converter.


Use the growing taxes generated from your expanding 'happy' population to grow more rapidly into neighboring areas and gain tactical advantage over your opponent.


Remember to continue to develop and once your colony is on top tier continue to develop the surrounding colonies.


When managing a lot of planetary bodies and colonies, use pause between actions to get more done in a short time.

General Tips:

In truth, space combat in LoA doesn't involve much tactics, more coming down to the stronger fleet statistically winning 90% of the time.

Having the right fleet configuration (ie combination of ships) can help you beat the odds where it is a closely matched encounter as well as your fleets' experience level.

There are 4 classes of ships available to build (Fighter, Corvette, Frigate & Cruiser), plus in later game you can also build a Space Station!

Try to match up to your opponent in ship size. If you are outmatched you can quickly loose, for example if they bring a cruiser and you only have a swarm of fighters there are good odds you will loose despite your superior numbers. Safe option is to always have a combination of most (or all) ship classes in each fleet with a focus on one class (frigates or corvettes work well) to help overcome your opponent.


As a rule of thumb, you will need ships of the same class or one class lower to effectively kill your opponent. So if he has a cruiser, you will want to have a cruiser or at least a lot of frigates to take it down. If you only had fighters or corvettes, you will suffer big losses and likely loose the encounter.

Most missions you will find your opponent is always around a certain fleet size/level when they attack or defend. You can use this knowledge to keep a fleet always bigger to keep them at bay. Likewise, after a few encounters you will know the general configuration of your opponent's ships in the fleets allowing you to match or exceed their strength.

Where you may be fortunate to have a much larger fleet, you can also consider splitting into two smaller fleets. This will help you dominate the sector, but if split too thin you risk loosing a fleet. You need to destroy some ships and rebuild them in another location to split your fleet.

How Fuel Works:

Each ship you build will require a certain amount of fuel to build.

Fuel is mined from your planets and asteriods as an alternative to ore using the Fuelsynth Station.

It is important to understand that you need fuel to build a ship, but it doesn't need fuel ongoing to maintain.

This means you can change your mines back to ore to increase trade again or if you loose the resource (planet is lost) your ship won't suddenly disappear!

If you however decide to remove it from the fleet to build something else, you will need those fuel resources again to build the new ship. Be careful not to do this without ensuring you have the fuel you need for the new ship.

As long as you don't delete or change your fleet ships, even if destroyed in battle they will be rebuilt maintaining your fleet size/strength even if you don't have the fuel!

Ongoing Mechanics:

Try to keep your fleet busy with encounters. This is not normally an issue on most missions :) Each encounter will increase your fleets experience. With this comes additional perks to swing the battles into your favor. These include faster travel and repair rates and increased accuracy, agility & fire rates.

Be Aware of your Fleets location at all times. Keep your fleet close to key planets (strategic locations, high population centres etc) as you want to have the opportunity to defend the location. You always get fore-warning of an attack giving you some time to counter. If you travel to a planet with 6 months travel time that will mean you are open to an attack for 12 months!

Keep up with your ship research. Very important to maintaining victory in space that can be easy to overlook when you are busy colony building. New research opportunities will become available as you progress through you missions. These will slow down your expansion due to their cost, but will strengthen you position.

Don't forget to upgrade you ship design blueprints after you unlock new upgrades. All ships will immediately be granted the new upgrades once saved.

Concise Overview.

There are thirty rather tough achievements to unlock in LoA.

They will require you to complete 100% of the game to get them all.

You will only be able to get a maximum of 33% of the mission completion on Normal difficulty mode, so to get all the completion achievements you will need to conquer the game on Hard difficulty.

You will get access to unlock more achievements the further you progress through the campaign missions.

Falling into five main categories, all are straight forward to understand (no tricky ones here) even though many are hard to obtain.

I will only mention them briefly with the following graphical summary:


Found your basic colony & then upgrade through each of the remaining 5 tiers.


Awarded for completing the campaign on Normal & Hard difficulty.


Awarded every 10% of the campaign mission objectives you complete.


Build a Government building, Aeroponics, Goods Factory, Nuclear Reactor, Hyperspace Gate Stabiliser & Atmospheric Convertor. Available later in campaign.


Win battles to promote your fleet. First half should be accessible earlier in game with higher levels needing later campaign.

Hungry for More Knowledge?

While learning to play LoA, I came across an excellent reference guide which I have linked below to give you easy access via the Steam Overlay.

It was written by Johan Van Kerckhoven (jvkerckh) and is hosted at GameFAQs.

Many thanks to Johan for his time and efforts to meticulously document this all down.
I found it very help and I hope you do to.

It provides comprehensive info on all the objectives for each mission including what you can build for each mission plus it covers the building costs & effects, ship & equipment statistics & colony population requirements among other things. Well worth checking out if you want to learn more. External Link @ :

"Everything (eventually) that you didn't want to know about Light of Altair, but were forced to find out anyway"[www.gamefaqs.com]

Remember there is also the Official Light of Altair manual (in PDF & readme.txt) available in your Steam Game folder which contains a lot of useful information (back story, keyboard shortcuts, gameplay basics plus more). This isn't setup as a proper manual in Steam (via right click on game icon) so you will need to navigate to it manually via a file explorer:



There is more helpful info in the Official FAQ for LoA[www.saintxi.com] at Saintxi Forums. - Link dead


For a full video campaign playthrough, Bormac (Many thanks for recording your experience through the campaign!) on Youtube playlist here may help you if you are stuck. It is end to end so you'll need to find where you were stuck from a bit of trial and error :(.

Save Game Files for Windows 7/8

Save game files for LoA are not located where you would normally look.

If you need to backup your campaign progress they can be found here (in Windows 7):




Happy hunting!

<< My Light of Altair Review >>


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* 1.1 (23rd Jan 17) - Fixed a couple small typos I spotted & formatting fix. *
* 1.0 (26th Jul 15) - Removed Official FAQ link - dead. *
* 0.9 (26th May 15) - Set guide language to English! *
* 0.8 (31st Oct 14) - Updated Follow Me under Appendix. *
* 0.7 (15th May 14) - Separated 'Save Location' to its own section for easy navigation. *
* 0.6 (27th Apr 14) - Replaced Guide Icon with better version + Minor refinements. *
* 0.5 (23rd Apr 14) - Finalised formatting, proof read & published. *
* 0.4 (17th Apr 14) - Added Achievements & Supplimental sections. *
* 0.3 (4th Apr 14) - Sub-headings finalised & most artwork added. *
* 0.2 (12th Mar 14) - Draft rough content for 4 main sections (in-progress .. slowly). *
* 0.1 (23rd Feb 14) - Created draft and basic outline. *