Agreed - I'd like to see the crit system in play before someone is broken. It adds colour and fun to proceedings and since it isn't going to radically alter the duration of the fight, there's no reason not to use it.It might not shorten the fight by much but it will make it more brutal and fun and unexpected, and players could then choose to continue to fight even though they have a mortal wound, maybe by spending a WP or something? And it makes the choice of spending additional more interesting than just doing additional damage.That's a fair point. Coriolis (I know, here I go again ) has hit points (=Strength + Agility) rather than depleting the attributes themselves, so it takes (a little) longer to wear someone down.
To my mind though, if a typical PC (and thus NPC) is going to have a strength of 3 then they're likely to go down with one or two hits anyway - a critical hit isn't going to significantly shorten the fight. Even a humanoid BBB is going to have Strength 6 at most (assuming they follow the RAW for character creation), so they're not going to be able to absorb much more punishment.
Also, what would be the point of inflicting a critical hit on an enemy that is already broken, the fight is finished anyway?
If I remember Rolemaster correctly (and it has been a long time since I played) high-level characters have lots of hit points, so the likelihood is that you'll achieve a crit long before those are depleted and most fights will come to an abrupt end.