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Just enough...but not too much.

Seriously - it will depend on you, what you are trying to do and what you are painting and even which bottle of paint you are painting from.

I have a friend who hates to paint. Well, not really hate - he just doesn't have the patience for it. Doesn't thin paints at all - works just fine for him. He won't win any competitions - but if he had to put two or three coats of each color on a miniature...he would have given up years ago.

You can get away with using a wet brush and not thinning with pretty good results too. Better than not thinning - not quite as good as something like a wet palette.

Which brings another method of thinning - the wet palette. Moisture soaks up through the substrate and you can pull paint out from the edge of a small drop. Near the center, it will be thicker, near the edge thinner. This allows you to work with multiple consistencies of paint at the same time.

I like to put a drop of paint and a drop of thinner next to each other on my ceramic palettes myself. I can then mix in a little extra thinner or a little extra paint as I see fit while I am working.

The correct answer is one that you will need to find yourself though. As you develop your skills - or decide you don't want to develop your skills...the answer will show up on its own as you get a feel for your paints, brushes and surfaces that you are painting.

I found a slightly more expensive but much easier and cleaner method for basecoating. Using 3 army painter color sprays I can paint the armor, weapons, and shoulder pads of a squad in less than 5 minutes. The color is clean and consistent every time. The added bonus is that I would spray before I attach the shoulder pads and weapons meaning I would always have a tournament legal army.

Honestly, I almost never thin my paints 1:1. If I want good coverage, I can get sufficient flow and higher opacity using less water. If I want transparency, I generally need it thinner (potentially with some matte medium added, along with the water) than that. I've only used one Warpaint paint (and a few inks) and found it flowed a bit more than most GW and VGC colors I have, out of the bottle. However, I can't be sure that other colors would behave similarly.

As Sean_OBrien says, there are any number of ways to thin and the degree to which you do it depends on your preference, the particular paint you're using, and the task at hand. It can be a steep learning curve, but once it "clicks" it just becomes second nature.

Armypainter does not need thinning much if any at all, the black is truely brilliant for detail work and touching up as bit thicker than gw black I find and much easier to control and better coverage.
Near perfect match to gw colour too.