Generally, engine start, taxing and take-off are done with radiators full open in most aircraft, from warbirds to cessnas in your local aeroclub.
During flight you can take advantage of the airflow helping with heat dissipation so theoretically the faster you go for a given power setting the less you need to open them. If you go flat out on the throttle thought, it's only natural that you'll need to open them.
Just like the previous posters said, i keep them open from engine start to take off, then use about 3/4 during the climb. In cruise and combat i can get away with about 50% or less (depending on aircraft) because i try to keep fast at all times.
That being said, it seems that the temp effects might be a bit understated in the sim. I'm not a real world pilot mind you so i can't say if it's realistic or it should be tweaked in a patch, i'm just going by my experience from other sims.
Anyway, my impression is that when idling on the ground with the rads fully open the temps take too long to rise or don't rise to the expected level at all. This is usually solved by advancing the throttle a bit during taxi, or just using about 30% throttle during the initial take-off run to let it warm up in a hurry, then apply full power.
Also, it seems that during flight i can't get the engines to overheat easily. I don't know how easy or hard it should be, i just find that after stepping into CEM and temp effects from day one with my only similar experience being some limited FSX flights with 3rd party add-ons on a friend's PC, i usually never have to worry about overheating during combat and didn't ever damage an engine unless i was doing it on purpose to see how it works.
I just set rads to a setting that works and forget about them until i need to change power settings for a prolonged amount of time, as cutting to idle to force an overshoot or going full power for a few seconds when chasing a target in a climb is not enough to drastically affect the temps.
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