Frederf: you're really onto something there with your assumptions, and there is something that the game would differ markedly from real life. An example I am familiar with is that Japanese destroyer captains were trained that Americans were right handed and that underwater evasion maneuvers were always to the right. (source: Japanese Destroyer Captain, Capt Tameichi Hara). Eugene Fluckey knew this and routinely turned left.
Concentrating on maneuvering conventions alone (for no particular reason, just picking one of the four), suppose the merchants were trained to turn to port to avoid. We'll talk about targets traveling from left to right here.
That being the case, if you shot before AoB 90, from ahead of the target, the target would see the approaching torpedo, turn left and diminish his cross-sectional area from the torpedo's point of view. This would greatly diminish the chance of a hit, and my experience with John P Cromwell shows that if they turn into the path you get almost no hits.
Gutted has talked about what us astronomers call "proper motion," that is the component of apparent motion from left to right (or right to left) from the point of view of the observer, who has no idea of the angle between the target's path and your path. Well, if you do the math on a 45º shot, our proper motion is 70% of the actual speed of the target. However if he succeeds into turning into the direction of the torpedo (straight at us!) his proper motion is exactly zero! He's stopped. The torpedo passes harmlessly to his right because it is programmed for the apparent speed, the proper motion, of his original course.
Now lets take the situation where you shoot after AoB 90 and the torpedo is approaching from astern of the beam. Here, if the target turns left, he turns broadside to the torpedo, presenting a much larger target to hit, thank you very much, he has suddenly made his situation much worse and BOOM!
If such an assumption were built into the game, and I haven't seen any evidence that it is, it would also be very important to set up assymetrical spreads to compensate for expected reactions. For instance, if firing from ahead and expecting him to turn into the direction from which the torpedoes are being fired, it would be important to fire a trailing shot that would miss a target which stays on course but would tag the target which turns in the anticipated direction.
Real skippers did that a lot, which explains a lot of their misses. Those weren't misses due to poor shooting, those were cover shots, ensuring a hit in those "what if" situations. Wasting topedoes to save your life ain't a bad proposition!
I could cover the other possible assumptions, but I think the general idea is here. Too bad I don't see any evidence of that behavior in the game. It was vital information in real life.
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