my friend and I have been trying to play multiplayer for days and have had no luck because as soon as we start the game one of us gets stuck loading permanently. we have verified files, uninstalled the game, and updated drivers and it still doesn't work. any help?

I've found loading the previous turn can help. It's a dance of play a few turns back up a turn.

we can't even start up any game so we don't have any turns to load.

i should have clarified we are stuck on the loading screen

Same here. The only versions we got multiplayer working  on were the release day version and the Beta 1.0.2.116 version.

We tried yesterday (August 29) with Beta 1.0.2.132, and got stuck on the loading screen at ~75%, after which the game was unresponsive. Current official version on steam also didn't work, so we reverted back to Beta 1.0.2.116 and it worked fine, again.