Been working on this mod for a while, with thoughts of it for a long time.

With 0.17, I had all the ingredients to make it work, I hope you will enjoy: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Hive_Mind

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when hosting multiplayer games in some scenarios.

Use the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experimental.

Minor Features

• Added ability to set a maximum number of map upload slots for multiplayer servers. Setting this is recommended to prevent the server from being flooded with map fragment requests from clients.

Optimisations

• Optimized alt-mode icon background rendering. more

Bugfixes

• Fixed that cut tool marked trees/rocks/cliffs for deconstruction when there was other valid entity in the selection. more
• Fi...

Changes

• Simplified rail building. Holding shift while rail building always activates the combination of ghost-rail-building + remove-obstacles, releasing shift returns back to normal manual mode. It doesn't matter anymore, whether the rail building started with shift or not. This removed the possibility to do ghost-rail-building without the remove-obstacles, but since it seems to be almost useless, we consider it to be worth the simplification.
• font/color rich text tags now have to be properly terminated. This means eg: "[color=red]Red circuits" will now need to be "[color=red]Red circuits[/color]". This fixes a number of issues with handling start/end tags. (https://forums.factorio.com/66263, ...

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when hovering over some inventory-like GUI elements.

Use the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experimental.

Bugfixes

• Fixed that pollution statistic values from entities were reversed and didn't increase evolution. more
• Fixed a crash when mods would set special_signal = true for virtual-signal prototypes.
• Fixed a crash when a mining drill is destroyed during the resource-depleted event.
• Fixed a crash when loading modded saves related to recipe migrations and fluidboxes.
• Fixed a desync related to the blueprint library and keeping outdated blueprints between versions.
• Fixed crash when undoing manual removal of entity marked for deconstruction. ...

Changes

• Reverted fonts used for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian localizations to pre-0.17.24 versions.

Bugfixes

• Fixed that circuit connection from ghost to entity wasn't preserved when it was upgraded or undone. more
• Fixed that it was possible to rotate entities whilst the technology GUI was open. more
• Fixed that the updates-available counter in the update-mods tab didn't update as mods woul...

Changes

• The Mods GUI will now always include a link to the mod portal for the selected mod.

Bugfixes

• Fixed roboport area rendering for players. more
• Fixed a crash when trying to print invalid values through the Lua API. more
• Fixed that the rail world preset didn't allow to get some achievements due to smaller base size. ...

Balancing

• Changed god controller inventory size to be the same as the character inventory size.

Bugfixes

• Fixed rendering of targeting range visualization for turrets with limited turn range. more
• Fixed parameters passed to LuaPlayer::zoom_to_world didn't have any effect. more
• Fixed that power poles would sometimes build automatically when they shouldn't. ...

Bugfixes

• Fixed that merging two electric networks didn't merge the statistics which was introduced by the power switch addition in 0.13. more
• Fixed light not turning off properly when using fluid energy source on an entity. more
• Fixed a crash when building large electric poles. ...

Nice

Bugfixes

• Fixed vertical squashing of listbox. more
• Fixed in-game updater would not work on Windows if Factorio path or write data path would contain non-ASCII characters. more
• Undoing action of building entity that removed ghosts also restores the ghosts. The same with removal of ghosts by cancelling deconstruction. ...

There are many configuration options in the PvP scenario: screenshot

So you can create a match to suit the people who are going to play it.

You can also set it up so you don't even fight each other, just working cooperatively from separate factories with independent research.

Bugfixes

• Fixed gates sometimes not closing when next to cliffs. more
• Fixed crashes related to GUI tables. more

Use the automatic updater if you can (check experimental updates in other settings) or download full installation at http://www.factorio.com/download/experime...

Changes

• Removed RTL language translations (Hebrew, Arabic). more

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash when opening technology tree.
• Fixed blueprint loading related to trains and temporary stations. more
• Fixed that the quick bar and shortcut bar weren't aligned on UI scales other than 100% and 200%, making the game literally unplayable. ...

Bugfixes

• Fixed various layouting problems related to tables.
• Fixed upgrading underground belt ghosts would not recalculate underground connections resulting in desyncs. more
• Fixed construction robot tutorial when spamming ghost radars. more
• Fixed that some entities didn't show the not enough power icon. ...