This is happening to me too.
By the way, a slightly simpler workaround (found on the steam forums for another game) is to find and rename the 40400_install.vdf file in the application directory. That'll be somewhere such as: Steam\SteamApps\common\ai war fleet command\
Then when you start up, it won't do any checks for first-time procedures. I tried this and it work wonderfully on my machine.