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Making Bronze weapons the standard is all fine and good, would make Iron/steel weapons all the more special.
Why would fighters be rarer though? Yes the armor is lighter but you are forgetting what barbarians actually ARE. Barbarians are the 'barbarians at the gates', they are the nomadic peoples, they are the savages that do not live in the cities. The cities themselves would have a lot of figthers/paladins/cavaliers/etc but no barbarians simply by virtue of actually being a civilization.
Very cool start! Just one little kvetch:
Shields:
buckler
light steel (quickdraw)
light steel
light wooden (quickdraw)
light wooden
heavy steel
heavy wooden
tower
Shouldn't that be bronze instead of steel if we're talking about the usual metal used? ;->
And yeah, the use of iron definitely depended, often, on what you had available where you were. From what I understand, Chinese iron was so awful on such a regular basis ([and still is, to this day] they'd tried an Iron Age not long after everyone else, but quickly went back to bronze for quite awhile), and it was so much easier to simply smelt and mold things like 1,000,000 arrow or crossbow bolt heads out of bronze, for example, that they stayed with bronze much longer than anyone else and did amazing things with it.
I've also heard that in the sub-Saharan empires of Africa, they had copper, but hardly any tin (Egypt was well-placed to send expeditions to the tin miners, or at least trade with others in the Fertile Crescent for it), so they basically went from the Stone Age to the Copper Age (very briefly, if at all, since copper weapons sucked without tin to harden them) right to the Iron Age, probably before anyone else on the planet (some sources think as early as the 3rd millennium BC). Inter-kingdom rivalries probably prevented a lot of "let's mount an expedition to sweep up the Nile or the coasts and nuke everyone else" fun during the Bronze Age for everyone else (and Nubia actually had quite a Bronze Age, since they traded a lot with the Egyptians).
One attribution of the collapse of the Bronze Age was a temporary shortage of tin (or maybe just access to it; the volcanic eruption of Thera [Atlantis? ;->] around 1300 BC kind of threw everyone off), making people look more to iron and figure out better ways of working with it. By the time more tin sources were available, the iron and steel stuff was much better and cheaper, so hardly anyone went back to bronze. ;->
During the New Hittite Empire (1400-1200 BC), there were quite a few steel implements, weapons, etc., but they were mostly just for the rich nobles. Masterwork (or even "magic," say +1 or +2) stats might be for steel, whereas the common, cheap stuff could be bronze.
LB
Very cool start! Just one little kvetch:
Shouldn't that be bronze instead of steel if we're talking about the usual metal used?
Shields:
buckler
light steel (quickdraw)
light steel
light wooden (quickdraw)
light wooden
heavy steel
heavy wooden
tower
It's mostly for mechanics reference purposes.