has there been a change to how pinewood and hardware cutters work?

I wonder what has changed with the game. I had my woodcutters and foresters perfectly balanced and 2 days ago sundenly all trees r gone over night, foresters not even close to keeping up. I shut down all cutters and buff them for about 12 hours, all trees back to about same as always. I restart all cutters and with in 24 hours ALL trees gone again. I don't want to hear how I have a bad ratio foresters to cutters, it has been running fine for weeks and I have changed nothing. I have not upgraded anything or added or removed anything in the wood chains. It looks like a fundamental change in the game itself.

Did you just sell a load of planks or bows, or use a large quantity up on buildings?
This would put a sudden stress lower down the production chain, it may have been fine as long as stocks higher up the chain were full, but the moment everything has to start producing again, suddenly you are chewing through pine logs.
Losing cavalry is the most dramatic example of this, horsies are very greedy, and when you suddenly have to start producing them again, they can kill all but the strongest wheat and water productions.

nothing sold bought build upgraded traded like i said it was just al of a sudden

I had this at a couple of places - reported it but no joy. As you say it was strange as it was at a couple of sites only. Gave up and added forester levels so it's ok again now.

hmm, noticed a common denominator here, it's Northisle.
Any indication that a forester you thought you had built, has suddenly vanished?

this could also be caused by your coal consumption, if you are capped on coal then your coking plants will not be working at full capacity, this also means they will be using less pinewood logs. If you suddenly start using buildings which require coal which were sleeping before then its also going to cause your coking plants to start using more logs. If you were capped on logs and coal then it means the economy overview would not have been giving an accurate result.

Trying to follow that as understand that the system is based on maths / logic. Was now aware of a dramatic change in either case. But it was odd to me that it was only specific cutter / forester groups that were affected. If suddenly there was an increase in demand for logs, wouldn't that just reduce the overall log store ? Or is the system so smart that a specific cutter will suddenly go ballistic and wipe out his own area in response to a local demand ?

Oh, and it happened to both pine and hard wood.

I am very unhappy with the state of the game, a lot of things are foobar. But here I think there is something else.

If you build something in the path of the cutter/forester, thus changing the length of the path it needs to walk, it will find a more convenient workyard; If the said workyard used to be a 25 deposit the cutter forester would be able to coexist on it. If the new workyard is a 5, (in a group of 5,) the (average) good ratio forester cutter is no longer what you had. So, one building in the wrong position, may affect drastically the efficiency of your foresters. If you had a combination of hardwood/pine in s7, for example, it can ripple from one type to another.

The answer to your question is: no.

I have an interesting one too about pinewood.
The economy thing says i have +1k per 12 hours yet my consumption is going down and not up. I have not sold any logs but it just keeps going down instead of up by 1k.