I love to play wide on large pangea maps, (Immortal - sometimes epic, mostly normal) so city specialization becomes a priority. Cities in wide empire don't need much food (because of limited happiness the growth is trade for number of cities), so often I find starting build with Colosseum or Worker or Archer. (But if I know that city will be on border, then priority is monument and walls). The kay here is to grab good land which is easy to defend. Later when my Empire finishes expansion limits, I build library->university in food cities and granary/workshop in production city. Ideally each city gets University eventually, but they are second priority after safety, happiness and basic infrastucture (improvements and eventually roads). Two cities size 4 and 6 working good tiles are amazingly useful and can easily compete with 12-size city, which needs to work a lot of food to keep growing. Usually I turtle behind in scince til Renesaince, but after first Universities are set, I skyrocket to Undistrial era and often is first at picking Order (which his kind of obvious choice for that wide empire). Caravans are used for internal trade to speedup key important cities, most of resources traded for money and try to build as many trading posts as possible. Very wide empire has many advantages, e.g. religion spreads very fast, you don't need to protect all cities - only border ones, you can switch improved tiles between cities (e.g. once University is up - then even size 4 city becomes extremely useful and improved mines can be worked by another city, which also needs University asap).
Edit: ah, if question is about Capital - then 2 scouts are usually the case on large maps, sometimes buyng 3rd or building it. Often Settler or Worker afterward, depending on map. I think rushing monument and granary is bad idea, because after initial boost, impact of those buildings is neglectable and tehy only suck money. There are more important things to do (e.g. if you are going to build settler, then granary is really waste of time and gold for those turns when settler is built)