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[Libash_Thunderhead]

Oh, they looks very good in stonesense.
I also like to build surface cities, but I don't usually use visualizers, so I stick to flat design. But I'm not a creative person, all my rooms are bland 3x3 squares with a bed.
I also recruit marksdwarves and set up the barracks in the center of the city so they can shoot at the keas.

[King Kitteh]

I'm thinking of embarking on a flat plain, and then digging a giant quarry into the whole Embark, leaving the shape of a fort as I go.

Afterwards I might fill the hole up from a river, have a nice underwater city.

[Chief10]

Wooden wall grates make great fences for your crop/livestock fields. Also balcony railings.

Oof, this is brilliant, can't believe I never thought of this

[Fleeting Frames]

Depends a little on tileset and picked wood. Most woods have black as secondary color, but black-cap will grab gray, which can give quite the different - and sometimes beautiful - effect, especially with partial transparency effects.

[Pirate Santa]

Depends a little on tileset and picked wood. Most woods have black as secondary color, but black-cap will grab gray, which can give quite the different - and sometimes beautiful - effect, especially with partial transparency effects.

Aesthetic value may vary but functionally they're perfect.
Block movement while still being destructible and allowing line of sight. They'll keep your cows fenced in but an invader can still kick/burn them down. 

[Urist McVoyager]

On the topic of defense . . .

I think one tile of floor jutting out from your wall isn't enough. I've climbed trees in adventure mode and you seem to be able to move one tile out and hold a rim. That's the reason a fortification isn't enough. Those have floors, I just checked their page on the wiki and it said they implicitly had floors on the bottom, just not the top. You can use fortifications at the top of your wall as long as you have a one-tile wide ring of flooring between them and the wall first. Just put a roof on top to make sure your people don't dodge over the fortification.

[Starver]

I think building plain walls and then carving them into fortifications gives you topped-off fortifications (as a hang-over, literally as turns out, of the original wall-top). But check wiki and/or experiment to make sure I'm correct, as I'm speaking from memory, right this moment.

[Crashmaster]

I like to have any surface constructions made of smoothed cast obsidian with the only entrance to underground through the casting. I embark on clay preferably or forest to build a crappy surface fort/ mold then force my dwarves to suffer 10-15 years on the surface before they can even dig underground.
Current fort's 100x100 12z clover shaped structure took 15 years before the last of the clay mold was broken away.

[Random_Dragon]

On the topic of defense . . .

I think one tile of floor jutting out from your wall isn't enough. I've climbed trees in adventure mode and you seem to be able to move one tile out and hold a rim. That's the reason a fortification isn't enough. Those have floors, I just checked their page on the wiki and it said they implicitly had floors on the bottom, just not the top. You can use fortifications at the top of your wall as long as you have a one-tile wide ring of flooring between them and the wall first. Just put a roof on top to make sure your people don't dodge over the fortification.

Peculair, but I've tested in arena mode and found that floors as an overhang seem to be impossible to climb up. In in literally, no option appears in the move menu.

Adding a fortification absolutely ruins it though, regardless of whether it was built as such or engraved from a wall.

[Fleeting Frames]

Trees are different. If you couldn't hold onto branches from below you'd have some trouble climbing one :p

[Random_Dragon]

Ah, there's your problem. Tree-climbing works differently from walls. That leads to another tip:

Trees are the enemy. Destroy them. And make as sure as possible that none can grow too close to EITHER side of a wall, especially if climb-proofing is part of your defenses.

[Montieth]

I would suggest a look at the book Castle. Its part of a 3 volume set of sort of young adult books dtailing the construction of castles, cathedrals, and a roman town.

First order of business is basic shelter. Build out of wood if you have wood to reasonably spare. This allows your mason to build up a stock of blocks while your miners dig stone AND dig a moat. Next to that moat build a wooden wall. This is, at its simplest form, a palisade. You will possibly have time to make a gate in it. Or perhaps a drawbridge of wood. You can make a tower or two at these corners.

When your mason has a sufficient supply of blocks, start building walls for a barracks. Make this a strong point. Your keep and town walls will be further from this. If you paln correctly you end up with wards within your town walls and with ways to delay or stop invaders.

[Altaree]

I would suggest a look at the book Castle. Its part of a 3 volume set of sort of young adult books dtailing the construction of castles, cathedrals, and a roman town.

First order of business is basic shelter. Build out of wood if you have wood to reasonably spare. This allows your mason to build up a stock of blocks while your miners dig stone AND dig a moat. Next to that moat build a wooden wall. This is, at its simplest form, a palisade. You will possibly have time to make a gate in it. Or perhaps a drawbridge of wood. You can make a tower or two at these corners.

When your mason has a sufficient supply of blocks, start building walls for a barracks. Make this a strong point. Your keep and town walls will be further from this. If you paln correctly you end up with wards within your town walls and with ways to delay or stop invaders.

David Macaulay wrote quite a few more books like this.  Castles is my favorite!  There is also Mosque, Pyramid, Underground, Unbuilding, Mill (great info on how to build small dam's, Ship, and the masterwork The Way Things Work!

With the new (to me) climbing and tree mechanics I have realized that I can no longer make one thick walls.  I need to make 3 thick walls with a cross section of Wall, Floor, Wall.  This will allow me to build as high as I want without the inside of the wall looking like a giant stack of shelves.  The inner passages don't have to be walkable once construction is complete, too bad I can pile in fill dirt.