Was running into the same issue. I have further information on how it would crash. I could set players, game name, internet/lan etc. After clicking OK, however, one of the two following things would happen:

A) Game would freeze without anything happening. Alt-tab wouldn't do anything, but alt-ctrl-del would bring me to the task manager

B) Without asking me what map I wanted to host, it would throw up the Stratis load screen. The progress bar never moved past 0%.

After following Panicsferd's advice, I can no longer reproduce the issue.