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[Leonidas]

1. How and to what extent do you control and defend the surface of your fortress?
2. How and to what extent do you control and protect caravans as they enter and leave?

My answers:
1. A wall with an anti-climbing overhang seven tiles from the edge, all the way around. The wall has sixteen bridge-controlled tunnels for entry.

The current fortress runs a lot of missions, and the dwarves returning from missions are vulnerable. So raised drawbridges run from the big wall to the edge of the map. This cuts the surface edge into sixteen segments, thereby containing siegers and ambushers to only a portion of the edge and lowering the chance that returning mission dwarves will run into them.

2. I always dig a caravan tunnel as the only way to reach the depot. The tunnel emerges near the edge of the map. The last few tiles to the edge are surrounded with raised drawbridges and an overhead bridge as a roof, so that surface enemies can't reach the caravan except in the unlikely event that they happen to spawn in those three edge tiles. I think this should be standard, but I wanted to get a sense of the DF community before recommending it to new players and putting it in the wiki.

I don't know of any way to control the caravan as it leaves the map. They seem to pick random exit points, and threaten to go insane if they can't reach them. If anyone has a trick for forcing merchants and guards off the map in a controlled way, I would love to hear it.

[PatrikLundell]

A. I try to floor it over as an anti vegetation method. I've tried walls close to the edge once, but that resulted in goblin sieges failing to find the open path into the fortress just a few tiles off the straight path. That was during 0.40.24, though.

B. 4 entrance tunnels up to about 10 tiles from the edge. 1 tunnel is caravan width, with the others are narrower (previously 1, currently 2 tiles wide). All tunnels have drawbridges at the beginning and end, as well as a lot of cage traps. The trade depot is in the recessed and floored over courtyard which serves as pasture and surface farming area.

Edit (after reading the post spawning this thread):
"The only one path in" method has been discussed and used before. It has been suspected to be behind some problems with caravans not entering the map properly, with a guess being lack of space for wagons being an issue, but no definite conclusions.

Also, I've had the issue of embarking on one side of a river, cross the river on a single tile wide bridge, and build my fortress (and trade depot) on the other side, only to suffer from a "wagons bypass your inaccessible site" message because the buggers decided to enter the map on the wrong side of the river (with 75% or so of the embark edge being accessible from the trade depot). I don't know if tearing down the bridge so there was no access at all to the trade depot from that side of the river would cause caravans to spawn on the correct side.

[Saiko Kila]

I think there is enough information on wiki in Trading article, to be honest, including the tunnels with drawbridges option. I used the tunnel with drawbridges as walls at the edge in v.0.31 and some newer versions, but in recent forts I don't care. The invaders come in the beginning of the month, while the caravan comes and goes in the middle, so they are separated chronologically. If there's siege, the caravan doesn't come, and the diplomat comes next season, often with the diplomat from the other race. It's too rare to have caravan destroyed by a siege to care, in my opinion. Main problem is removing corpses and body parts, so they don't get spooked...

The only thing I do is separating the way for walkers and for caravans in my fortress, where the depot is located. I use the trick with a tunnel accessible only to wagons, so they don't have to try to path through the traps (which they can't), while the walking merchants and security walk through traps as normal.

And for controlling trees - either floors or, in further places, just disabled stockpiles.

Still, as far as I know, for people who care, the tunnel is one of the most common methods to make traders safer. And a bridge at the edge of the map is an easy way to stop invaders spawning at the tunnel entrance (the three bridges forming the walls are always up, the fourth, at the edge, is down when the caravan is expected to come, or when it needs to leave). By the way, there's no need to make this bridge only 3 tiles wide. I used to make it 10 tiles wide, so they have more space for manoeuvres.

[PatrikLundell]

I agree sieges aren't much of a threat to caravans, for the reasons Saiko Kila mentioned, but if you're in a reanimating biome undead may still be.

I've used stockpiles to control trees in the past, but I've gotten the impression that the suppressed saplings and other vegetation in/under the stockpiles still drain view FPS.

[Werdna]

1.  Animal watchtowers to reveal ambushes as they enter*.  Moat and drawbridges snug around the fort to control where both invasion and caravans enter (with a house rule that one path/bridge into the fort must always be open - no turtling).  Since caravans pick an entrance on their appearance and don't seem to deviate (at least the wagons don't), its important to have all bridges down before they arrive so they head for the nearest.

2.  Military pretty much.  I enjoy having tons of extra invaders, so staying ahead on the military curve is critical in my games.  Protecting the caravan, wherever it appears, is part of the fun.  Since the caravans arrive mid to late in the season and invasions arrive early, protecting caravans is usually just a simple matter of being aggressive and breaking up the siege/ambushes as soon as they appear.  After a few years into embark, I've noticed that invaders and caravans appear to have 'preferred' locations where they appear, so I may build out defense organically to take advantage of this. 

Current fort:  http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-33717-2topside

Edit:  I'm still on 43.05, so I haven't had to deal with the 'returning squads' problem.

* races in Fortress Defense mod still ambush, it's a pity the gobbos lost this ability because it is a 'fun' and challenging one to deal with

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

1) Cheesemakers who've been told to pick up a shield and xbow. 
2) Meh. Their loss. Should have brought their own guards.

[gchristopher]

I almost always play in reanimating biomes with thralling clouds/dust, with a tile or two of non-reanimating biome in the center of the map to permit butcher shops in the fortress.

This pretty much requires attacking the edge with bridges/floors to create a single point of entry for the caravan. Close the airlock to the caravan well before they leave so the only available exit is the protected one. Ideally put the trading post as near the map edge as possible while still having pet dogs/cats/whatever stationed overhead along the entry corridor to detect intruders so they can be diverted into the self-cleaning traps (cart grinders/squirt guns/etc).

A military isn't that much use in an environment where going outside or contact with thralls is instantly fatal and also creates a new thrall.

Diplomats are much more difficult to handle. Visitors aren't worth the trouble in this scenario.

[weiserthanyou]

A: I've gradually assimilated almost half of the surface of my embark into my fort through a series of walls (think the levels of Minas Tirith). Most of it is empty, but as the only way to access it is from within the underground section of my fort, I use it as emergency extra space. While my fort has a number of entrances, only one (the main/aboveground caravan one) isn't perpetually shut well once they get around to finishing walling off the caverns like I told them to three years ago.... That one is watched by a few ballistas, the barracks for several elite squads, half the traps in my entire fort, two doberman bombs, something like 6 drawbridge airlocks/atom smashers (a holdover from the expansions outward, one ring at a time), and a chained war leopard.

B: Note to self: Your method would be the right way to get that caravan-only entrance to work... As it is I just have an alternating gate to protect caravans in the trade depot along my main entrance.

[Sver]

1) As of late: fake patrols. Two or more squads, who are off-duty, but still equipped. They get fishing (for melee/ranged troops) or hunting (for ranged troops) turned on; sometimes, other outside jobs, like herbalism - the latter allows me to direct them to specific locations when needed. As I like to play forts that are mostly above ground, large part of the map is my walled off settlement, so the patrols easily cover the rest. They function on their own, take breaks when they need it, can be set to active during emergency and mostly obey the civilian alert otherwise. These patrols tend to slaughter all animals that enter the map, though, but I gotta tell you how much of a pain in a butt wild animanls can be for an above ground fort, even if it's just a bunch of hares.

2) I don't worry about the caravans much, for the reasons described by Saiko Kila. Not a fan of evil biomes either. Otherwise, patrols got them covered.