Welcome to the game and to the forums
Sorry about the inconvenience, but I think I know how to fix it.
Judging by it getting stuck at that particular step (8/9) it sounds like the automatic update check is not being allowed by something on your computer, though that thing is not actually crashing AIW (as often happens when it's an antivirus doing it, etc). Possibly if you mimize the game as Fleet Unity suggests you'll see that your OS is asking you whether to allow the program to connect or something like that. Either accepting or rejecting the request should allow the game to continue.
If it's not asking for you to accept/reject that, or that just doesn't work, you can disable the update check from within the game, but since it's not letting you get that far you can do this to disable it manually:
1) make sure the game is not running
2) open notepad or any text-editor you please
3) paste this text into it:
FromVersion:7001
AutomaticallyCheckForUpdates:1
4) save it as settings.dat , in your AIW install's RuntimeData directory, for most steam installs that's "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AI War Fleet Command\RuntimeData\"
5) run the game
Let us know how it goes