I have a few questions about The Core Stability Law. It reads

FOR: During each status phase, all action cards are drawn and placed face up on the table. The player with the highest unexhausted influence may choose his action cards first, followed by the player with the second-most unexhausted influence, etc.

1) The players all agreed if you had Neural motivator then the players two cards went in the pile. However, we disagreed on Hyper Metabolism. He thought that if he discarded an action to get an action it would indeed go into the pile and not in his hand.( he has the tech not me) I said that By discarding an action card for an action card the action card he drew would go straight into his hand and not the collective pile of action cards. His argument is that since you are drawing an action card during the status phase, during step e, then indeed that card goes into the collective pile. I argue since the card read "before drawing action cards" that the tech's effect would take place between the d & e steps of the status phase, thus not factoring into the law.

Hyper Metabolism reads: during each status phase, you gain 1 additional command counter. In addition, before drawing action Cards, you may discard 1 action card from your hand to draw 1 additional card.

2) If everyone is tied at 0 influence (aka no unexhausted planets) then who picks their action card first? Some said that it would be by initiated, or would the card be null for that round, or is there another possibility I haven't thought of?

Well that is a good question.

I would say Initiative Order if there is a tie (or some would probably say "Speaker Decides") but it doesn't really matter as long as your group is consistent.

I would have to say, up until now, my group has always only played with the first card being put into the pile face up. Any subsequent AC's would be deal face down to that player and not able to be chosen. This may or may not be against the rules as written, but it's how my group has adapted to it. And we would play that way with Hypermetabolism also.

Technically, I think that Hypermetabolism would be exempt since it happens before the AC draw, though I'll admit the exact wording is not in front of me.

Because it says to discard an action card before drawing action cards to draw 1 additional card, I imagine you would; for example with 6 players draw 8 cards choosing them by order of influence ties by initiative order with the player with the tech taking three on his turn.

All actions cards that would be drawn should be played face up with each respective player taking the ammount they would normally recieve. Races like Yassaril taking upwards of 4 action cards (racial, hyper and neural).