I noticed that there not much information about how to obtain Epic heroes so I build up a quick guide from what I found on the web (mostly on the TKO forum)

Heroes summits

The easiest way to get heroes is probably with the heroes summits.

First you get a level one Liu Bei/Sun Quan/Cao Cao once you get a level 9 resources fields, which is great since they have farm (increase you food output by 25%) this will help you create a super capital if you followed my guide on how to build a city of 15 slot of food or even 18 slot of food.

The heroes you get depend on your kingdom (most of them lv1):
For Shu: Liu Bei,
one of those 3 one star heroes: Liu Feng, Wang Ping, Huang Chengyan
one of those 2 two star heroes: Ma Dai, Jiang Wei
And when you have 14 cities:     Guan yu (lv 100)
For other kingdom it the same here the heroes I got with my other account:
Wei: Cao Cao, Xian hou Dun, Wei Xu, Dian Wei (lv 100)
Wu: Sun Quan, Zhou yu(lv100), Gan Ning, Meng Huo

Hermit house

You can recruit Epic heroes at the hermit house, it might seem a bit more complicated than the Heroes summits but once you know it actually easier since it doesn’t require to do much.
First go in your quest tab then select Hermit house

Do all the quest you can to have flag for different faction
the easiest are probably using the forge and battle arena, the other quest you need to to have stell ship for another quest (you get this from disenchanting item in the forge) and the last quest is to hunt and win vs a escort guardian.

Once you got all the you need for a specific hero you can challenge him, if your hero win you get the heroes at level one, you can recruit up to 5 epic heroes that way.

More on Hermit house  & Heroes summits

Note

If you are wondering which hero to chose I would suggest to take the hero that will have farm has a middle skill. There actually 2 heroes that have farm : Zhang  Cheng(farm 9%) and Liao Hua (7%) . I think Zhang  Cheng is a must since he have 73 of politic too, making him a excellent governor.

If you want the list of all the heroes in the hermit house you can look at that thread.

Career Center

The good old career center can give you epic heroes too but that require you to pay gold.
There 3 way to recruit

Wandering heroes
It is said that some time the are heroes that appear in the wandering section of the career center, however this only happen in capital city.
Note is happened once that Koram made a special event and there are wandering heroes in your city that you can hire for gold, it usually a ton of gold (like 2k…) so it’s not the most cost effective way to recruit.

Basic search (1gold)
Probably the most cost effective way to search but each search have low chance of giving an epic compare to the advance search, you can have an epic if your lucky according to these link below but I personally never got anything via that search. Weirdly I never got any epic with this using gift voucher.

Advance search (10/50 gold)
Most who have tried it don’t recommend the 50 gold search, some tried it once and regret it.
Save gold by doing 10 gold searches rather than 50’s.

Note that for all the search increasing your court rank helps to have more epic heroes in your Career center.

Even to Count / Duke will help your chances more.
If you really pump money in and get to Infante or above then roll the 50g searches as these will produce more.

You can get more info on the forum here, here and here.

Note that advance search even have complaints.

Escort guardian

This is another great free way to have epic heroes, but the ode a super sucky
I fortunately got a lot of good heroes with this and what really cool is that they arrive level 100.
So far from that I got Zhang Bao, Guan Xing, Zhao Tong, Li feng, Wen Yang, Jiang Ji and Yan Yu.

I do about 8-10 escort guardian a day and it happen around every month or so that I get a Epic so you do the math 🙂

Epic soul

This is not really a great way to have heroes but if you need to attack and have  extra heroes for you coalition or to defend or to grab a oasis from another player, soul are a great way to do that.
It can be a way to defend your city and protect your real heroes while will you getting attack too.
They are unfortunately gone after a certain amount of time (usually 6hr, it’s written beside the soul name)

Other ways

Special event: Black flag camp
There use to be a special event call the Black flag camp where you can get a heroes if you manage to destroy all the troop in the camp and have a special item in your inventory (Intelligence letter).
The heroes guarding the camps are Pang tong, Taishi Ci and Yan Liang.
The camp require massive amount of troops to kill and there only a 50% chance of having the hero but in all case your league will receive a prize even if you don’t get the hero.
More info on this in the forum.

If you know any other way to recruit epic please let me know, I’ll try to keep the list up to date.