Early workers are super important, but it's an area of the game where I need to improve. Sometimes I camp an AI city for ages and do not get anything, other times I let my units wander off too far when they should be defending my lands from barbarians and securing worker steals.
Cultural CS are tricky. You want as much culture early on to finish tradition, then you want no culture until renaissance (for science games anyway), and then you want as much as you can get. From that point of view, it might actually be beneficial to keep stealing from a cultural CS. Your influence will improve during the time you stay at war (but of course you won't get quests to improve it further), and if you have a bunch of Kabul workers, you can let them get captured by AI or barbarians, and then liberate them for 50 (?) influence. A little bit tedious, and harder if you do not have EUI where you can name your workers, but still useful in many games.
