How do districts work?

[Zebeast46]

Just asking this question since I am not entirely sure how they work in general.

[x4000]

It's... about to change a lot based on player feedback.  But not until tomorrow sometime.  So I'll let others fill you in in the meantime.

[tadrinth]

Currently each Civic Center creates a new district. Buildings assign themselves to the nearest Civic Center to decide which district they're in, and Civic Centers must be built 25 tiles apart.

Each district reduces the number of buildings that count toward the soft cap at 80 buildings.  Once you go past 80 buildings, there is a rapid increase in crime rates to discourage building large empires without establishing new districts, which requires expanding rather than turtling.  You can counter the crime increase with police, but eventually you'll need a riot police station every couple tiles across your whole empire.

I think there is a change coming that strictly limits the number of buildings, rather than more buildings increasing crime. 

[TheVampire100]

Just asking this question since I am not entirely sure how they work in general.

From each district are chosen  two citizens, one male and the other female, that compete in a giant arena for the entertainment of the sentral district.
No, wait, this was something different.

Currently they don't have much of a feature.
But maybe in the future you can quarantine individual districts instead of the whole city (would make sense if only one district is infected... why do I have suddenly Pathologic in mind?).
Maybe you can also change the budgets depending on the district to specialize your districts (one for science, one for cleaning up pollution, buisness district and so on).
The district feature has some potential.

[ptarth]

I am cautious about how much individuality Civic Centers will grant their districts. The earlier independent city variants made it clear that multiple cities were awkward. Reimplementing a system to make districts more awkward is counter productive. While, some differentiation might be good, but I fear that too much could lead us back to disaster. Plus at this juncture, if it works, it should be left to the polish stage so more immediate focus can be spent on larger issues (e.g., AI, mid-game, late-game, market items, win conditions, etc).

[Cinth]

I didn't get a chance to tool around with multiple cities but I have with multiple districts.  It functions like the main city hub does for all intents and purposes.  I choose to separate each each district into purposed areas, resources, polluters, population.  It's the only way to grow your city right now.