How about: You can get npc war machines, but not npc warriors.
I mean your view that wars shouldn't be skirmishes is fine, but your solution has nothing to do with the problem. How is having the npcs fight going to help solve the fact that wars should be epic rp events?

Maybe have npcs that do patrol duty around your island but can't leave.

Because there's still a mass of fighters slaughtering one another. Yes, it's just massive slash fests but it's honestly still more impressive then small skirmishes.

But who will see these battles?

Commanders, and any human soldiers on the fray.

I think that is a last resort we should try to avoid. Let's think of ways to get more people playing 2k2 and more of those into roleplaying right now.

This is also a way to balance things. Dustari has 20423 members currently and kingdoms like Zormite have many fewer. If the strength of the armies is decided by your player count alone then Dustari will always have the advantage. Putting NPC characters into the fray lets us even things out.

there is kinda of a way to get units, but summoning is disabled :P anyways yeh Dustari does have a lot of members and without some way to balance things better, it may turn into a world war upon Dustari :P

It should be made to even kingdom power out like Kai said.
I'm sure there is a way to see how many people are in each kingdom and based on the amount of people in it it should restrict them to the amount of NPC fighters they should be allowed.