Overview:
- Estimated achievement difficulty: 6/10
- Offline: 26 [430]
- Online: 9 [275]
- Approximate amount of time to 705: 25-40 hours
- Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 2
- Number of missable achievements: 2
- Glitched achievements: None!
- Do cheat codes disable achievements?: No Cheats
Introduction:
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth 2 was one of the first RTS's to grace the 360. While the controls were difficult to master, there was fun to be had. Many completionists will be annoyed by this game due to the fact that it does not have 1000 points as all retail games do, only 705.
All of the single player achievements are easy to get, but are just as easily missed. There are achievements for beating every single mission in the game, but you must also complete a set of bonus objectives to get the achievement. The only achievements you should worry about in the campaign are "Servant of the Secret Fire", and "Servant of the Shadow". After you beat a mission, make sure you always check the stats, and see if any heroes have died. Something that not too many people know, is that on top of your regular heroes, summoned heroes, like Tom Bombadil, or the Balrog count towards these achievements as well.
The multiplayer achievements are a pain, as they require you to win 10 matches in each game mode, and for you to beat someone 20 ranks higher than you. Good luck doing this normally, as the community for this game is lacking. If you want to get any of these achievements, you need to boost them.
Step #1: Good Campaign
The first thing you want to do is start on the good campaign, as it is easier to complete than the evil campaign. What makes the good campaign easier is that you have ability to heal your units, as such, you want to make sure you get the Heal power as soon as you can. With this power, you can use your heroes freely without having to worry about voiding "Servant of the Secret Fire" achievement as much. If you do happen to lose any of your heroes, restart the level. If you continue the campaign if you've lost a hero, you must start a new campaign to get the achievement.
Step #2: Evil Campaign
The evil campaign is slightly harder than the good campaign as there isn't a reliable way to heal your units, and that a good majority of the evil units won't be able to last as long as their good counterparts. As such, you always want to make sure you have a constant stream of units coming in to replace any fallen units. Also, you have to be a little more conservative with your hero units, as you can't heal them. If at any point you lose a hero unit, make sure you restart the level as you would with "Servant of the Secret Fire", or else you will void "Servant of the Shadow".
Step #3: Multiplayer
One of the first things you will need for the multiplayer achievements, is a boosting partner. Seeing as how you only have to quit a game for it to count as a win, it shouldn't take too long, but the amount of loading screens will make it much longer then it needs to be.
Conclusion:
The hardest part about maxing this game out, is for the most part multiplayer. The lack of a community makes finding games extremely hard, and majority of the multiplayer achievements unachievable without a boosting partner. As long as you can find someone, this is a fairly easy, alibeit annoying 705.
[XBA would like to thank Asian47 for this Road Map]