Your second move, Nc6, was dubious. In Q-side openings, you will usually want your c-Pawn either on c6 (for defense) or on c5 (for counter-play). In either case, your Knight should not be on c6, since that blocks your c-Pawn.
Almost got completely destroyed in the opening game by 1.d4
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So in this game, I was playing as black against the queen's pawn opening. I don't really study any opening lines since I think it's more important to focus on strategy and tactics as a whole. But anyway, I tried to play it like the four-knights defense, trying to get center control.
But that didn't work at all. Through a series of me making bad and wrong moves, white was able to get a d4 e5 pawn formation, and I completely lost center control. I tried to break out with 12. f6, but in hindsight, that was a fatal mistake that the opponent luckily missed. If not, I would have 100% lost after I did 12. f6.
So my questions are :
1. From a high-level chess strategy perspective, why did my attempts to control the center fail so miserably? Moving the knights to control the center squares usually works, but it didn't in this scenario. From my PoV, it seems it's because because I lost too much tempo by having my knight kicked around, which let white develop, while I couldn't.
2. How do I recover after white gets a dominant center position? I attempted to fianchetto the bishop to get indirect center control, but that was more ineffective than I expected.
3. If I should have done a pawn break, on which side? It looks like a pawn break on the queen side might have been better, but if so, how would I even attempt to do that when I'm so far behind in development? With the open c-file, it just looks hopeless to do a pawn break given that white can double up his rooks + add in his queen to not only shut down any pawn breaks, but to also attack the super weak c6 square that my knight was on from moves 10 and onwards after I did 10. b5