It's been a busy day for "gone gold" and/or "release date" announcements. The latest is for Empire: Total War, the upcoming historical RTS game from developer The Creative Assembly and publisher Sega. Originally scheduled for early February, Sega has now confirmed the game will ship to stores on March 3 and available to download and purchase on March 4.

Both retail and downloadable versions of the game will require activation via Valve's Steam service (similar to the PC versions of THQ's Saints Row 2 and the upcoming Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II). If you have been wondering if your PC rig can run the game, wonder no more as Sega has also issues the minimal hardware specs for Empire: Total War:

Operating System: Windows XP 32(service pack 2), Windows Vista 32 OS.
Processor: 2.4 GHz Single Core Intel or AMD equivalent processor.
System Memory: 1GB RAM (XP) 2GB RAM (Vista).
Graphics Card: 256MB DirectX 9.0c compatible video card (shader 2.0 or higher).
Sound Card: Directx9.0c compatible sound card.
Windows compatible mouse & keyboard.
15 GB free uncompressed hard drive space.