So we used the "spawner overhaul mod" (The 1.03 one, working on factorio 11.1, you can download here if you want to have a try: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 1&start=50)
Basically it makes the ressources spawns a lot more far, excepted one spot of every ressource at the start.
The more far you go, the better chance you have to find big or rich ore and oil (wich is a lot more rare than in vanilla, making it very precious)
The bitters are also more rare and more far, but its still challenging, because you have a very large territory to defend, and the ressources are harder to get.
So we barely had enought ressources at start to make trains and get a decent start of a factory, but then, we had to explore to find some precious iron and oil, because we had only 1 oil pump at our start location.
We played this game for 17h now, and i still want to continue it a lot more xD, it went very addicting.
Here are some screens to share with you what we worked on!
The whole factory in a map screen, with all the train network going in 3 differents ways on the map:

The main station, handling 8 trains runing at the same time:

The west side of the rail network:

The big iron outpost on the west, it's our eldorado:
We had 4 trains runing non stop on this line.

The North and South Sides of the train network:

Our power set-up:
We did chose to not use solar panels, because we found it more challenging to use something dependant on a ressource, and also because we had a few copper on the map.
So it made the coal a precious ressource, because we could'nt afford to use the oil to make solid fuel (all the oil is cracked in gaz because its too rare), and then it made it a vital reason to get coal from far with the train network, adding more fun to the game.
(I remember a moment when we went ou of coil because the far coal outpost was nearly out, and then we had to run to an other coal deposit, set up a train station in emergency, and then we had hard time to restart it!
After the factory got bigger, the belts wasnt fast enought to provide coal to every boilers, we even had to use blue belt to make them all working

Our furnace nightmare:
At this point of the game we just finished to put 2 green modules on every furnace, making them using -60% of the power, something very helpfull when you rely on coil for electricity, and you cant afford use too much.

The high-tech department:

The oil department:
