I've only just started playing PA, and I'm making practice lobbies to try and get better, like usual. After clicking start, the game will load normally. However, once it gets to the screen above the planet, telling me to pick my starting location, all i can see is 'Generating Planets'. The are UI elements there, like pinging, the players, and the planets in the system (which only lists the sun and 'system'. I've left the game running, to see if it's just my hardware being old and slow. I came back ~6 minutes later and it was still loading. I also couldn't exit the game, and had to manually shut down my comp. Any help would be very much appreciated, as I still want to play this game.
If you think "Generation planets" take to long (more than 1-2 minutes it's long) then try to press F5 and most likely you'll able to play after UI reloaded.