I don't understand the cries about this being a "fantasy game".

Yes, it's seemingly based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, but so what? The novel isn't fantasy, it's grounded in history, despite having fictitious story elements. In a game such as TW, you make your own history. So whether it's based on real history or the RotTK novel, it doesn't matter. As long the units and buildings look historically accurate, then it's fine.

As for Hero units, they will be perfectly fine if they followed Shogun 2's module, where the Hero units are hard to get and expensive, and you can only have one of them.