DYNASTY WARRIORS 9 Empires

Epic Artifacts are rumored to drop on hard difficulty, but in my two playthroughs I've never seen any.

Start up a new game and select the scenario "Northern Campaign" on Chaos difficulty, custom officers off.

Pick Cao Rui (All -> Emperor) as your character. He might be a generic officer, but he uses Cao Cao's favorite weapon - and I do believe he is quite a capable fighter. I had no problems mowing through chaos difficulty with him. You can still select any other Wei officer in the battle preparation screen with "LB" if you want.

After the game starts, equip the best artifact you have. Cao Rui has ice on his default weapon, but slash also works very well. Equip bandits as your military unit.

Immediately move all your best musou officers to Hefei, right next to the (red) Wu territory with the square dot, then invade Jianye to take everything.

Move all your officers to Ye or Guangzong, below Gongsun Yuan's territory, invade and take over that part of the country.

Save your game and attempt to make an alliance with Liu Shan. If it fails, reload and try again until you succeed.

Now play the game normally until a vanguard unit attacks. They're easy to beat and a good chance on an epic artifact. Note that the drop rate may still be very low even on chaos difficulty. Work on your Level and Titles while waiting for the next vanguard unit, never just "rest".

Remember to renew the alliance once it expires.

Good luck.

Just a rough guide if anyone is struggling to find one as I was for the first half of the game never getting anything except legendary as my highest & I Played until level 55 on beginner, level 40 on normal, level 50 on hard & finally level 31 on Chaos(which I received it on)

What I suggest doing that worked for me was play chaos mode > The Fall of Shu as Sima Zhao & chose to invade the Wu emperor in 6 months time that gives you time to either do some strategies preferably training/ recruiting people on strolls. The month before the invasion make sure to change positioning of all the highest officers/generals to the territory your using for the attack(before you go to the fight make sure to save game), after There’s only Shu territory left the idea I had was to save game and try make an alliance(12 months to do training/banquets/defence of territorys/recruit) I noticed everytime your successful, your percentage to make an alliance goes higher for next time so we’re going to save manipulate for results until making an alliance is 100% successful. With each alliance being 12 months you should be aiming towards levelling up your skills, officers, territory defence levels and companionships.. all whilst trying to aim for an Epic title(doesn’t really matter which one we want the 40% epic artifact chance that chaos gives)

Occasionally there will be insurgency invasions where there will be a lot of vanguard officers trying to take over our land, these are the ones we will be getting the rewards from, so again position all our highest levelled officers on the territory that is getting invaded( make sure to save after doing so) make sure to not go too difficult with the secret plans unless your 100% confident you can complete them as you don’t wanna spend upto 20 minutes on a level to lose and have to repeat.

Basically rinse and repeat above until you get the artefact and hopefully it’s an elemental one instead of a plain one like I got on my first..

Rarer items are obtained easier the higher the difficulty setting you have set and the higher level your character/turn number is. I'd highly recommend doing your playthroughs on hard mode as it seems to be the most reasonable difficulty to balance drop rates and playability (on Chaos you are spending 5 minutes just trying to kill one enemy officer and one wrong move gets you killed in one hit).

You will get Gem Artifacts after winning battles and only one drops, so you have to hope it is epic (gold) quality

I finally earned the epic Gem Artifact (after 20 hours of trying) playing on hard mode as a custom officer I made, on the save I own 10 territories, have the title of King, my character is level 41 and I am on turn 161, the scenario is 'A Gathering of Heroes'.