My 2cents on the capital is to always assume it won't be moved because you don't know if there will be a better feasible site (remember no city razing especially), let alone one that you can get developed in enough time to make it worthwhile - ie a lot has to go right to make moving worthwhile unless you have an absolutely abysmal starting location. All we have now to base our decision on is the knowledge of the current map plus guesses due to blue circles etc, I would assume since there are 2 corn we can use at this point the expected value over the course of the game points towards assuming it will not move.
I think we should cottage the capital, at least until we decide whether we will move it or not. Remember we can move it later to a location with wkshps instead of waiting for cottages to develop and use the beauro bonus on production to build research and research buildings only there. I like the idea of mid's-SE transition to an HE with a cottaged capital under beauro but we will need to see more of the map to see if that is feasible.
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gnejs - FS argues for a CE since it give +2
to towns
Also against the CE is the need to self-research democracy on this level. With only the capital cottaged, missing emancipation can probably be overcome by building workshops under SP/caste in the later used tiles and running sci's while waiting for guilds/chem. The fact that we can bulb chem early also argues more for earlier wkshops and a HE.
Also in space race HE gets the parts build faster than CE full stop.
Random thought - IMO nothing is more powerful than taking decent AI capital locations early. That's why the inca's got banned from HOF. Let's get the airships out and figure out how to take at least our neighbor quickly and make that priority one. That will also protect ideal future city sites from being blocked by AI settler stupidity.
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klarius - what units are the AI going to build from the start as defenders and what techs are they most likely to research first?
Can we paratroop into fog?
EDIT: No comments on the PPP.