I have been playing 1.Nf3 lately and have been doing better in my games. I used to play 1.c4 but realized that I could get all the same positions by just playing 1.Nf3 instead while avoiding 1.c4 e5 entirely. I never had a problem with 1...e5 against the English, but if I could avoid the whole thing and lighten the load...

The problem is that many of the openings are "hypermodern." It is never clear what I should be doing because there is never anything in the center. Here are some examples:

And now I am not sure of how to continue. Playing d4 immediately leads to all of the pieces getting swapped and e3-d4 just leads to an isolated pawn. Usually I play moves like Rc1 and Nfe5 to try and attack b7 and Black's queenside since the bishop is hard to develop but I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Another...

And at this point I really didn't know what to do. But a different approach would be even more telling:

I do not play this opening, so I'll just talk generally about what I see.

Concerning your first setup, I would think you could play Re1 and then e4, with the idea of putting the pawn on e5.  That would be a real pain in the butt for black.  You could get a kingside attack going with moves like Qc2/Ng5, and perhaps you are able to get your e1 Rook to e4...there's a lot there to work with.

I dislike your second position.  Black is threatening e4, and white has to make his position worse to meet it, I think.

I agree with your analysis of position 3, that it's proabably best there to play d4 and castle kingside, but I do not play this opening so maybe someone else can tell you better.

The final game is brilliant, but much riskier than I like to play!

Although it is positionally a little different, you might want to study King's Indian Attack to see how to attack kingside with a fiancetto structure like you are playing.  There's a lot of middle game theory and some excellent Bobby Fischer games to check out on the subject.  Then you can incorporate your queenside play into that, after you come up with a solid attacking strategy.  Good luck!

Thanks for the help. Basically I would like to get as many thematic positions on both side of the board as I can and this move order seems to be a good way to do it. The Slav/Semi-Slav has been the hardest for me to get used to because the moves don't make much sense to me. I would just try to play a main line but there are too many versions of the defences to even bother. So I would like to play something based more on tactics than anything...